President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have turn out to be an inseparable duo. Since Trump’s reelection, the richest man on the planet — and certainly one of Trump’s prime marketing campaign donors — has been a shadow trailing him at his Florida residence. The tech billionaire has taken middle stage within the incoming administration, promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal authorities’s price range.
A whirlwind relationship growing between a politician — on this case, the president-elect — and a monetary backer isn’t uncommon. What stands out is how a lot the donor himself is within the highlight. Tim Walz’s joke that Musk, not JD Vance, was Trump’s working mate, rings extra true on daily basis. “We’ve by no means actually seen anybody be that immediately related with a marketing campaign except they had been the candidate,” says Jason Seawright, a political science professor at Northwestern College and co-author of Billionaires and Stealth Politics.
It makes Musk an oddity amongst his billionaire class, who nearly at all times use their affect quietly.
He’s exhibiting different members of the ultra-wealthy a daring various to stealth politics, urged on by a president-elect who has embraced giving billionaires a seat on the desk. A non-public citizen can seize energy in full view of the general public — so long as they’re wealthy sufficient, and have sufficient followers.
“We’re in an period that I name ‘in-your-face oligarchy,’” says Jeffrey A. Winters, a professor at Northwestern who researches oligarchs and inequality. Twenty years in the past, it was a problem to get his college students to grasp that there have been oligarchs within the US. Now, he says, “I’ve a really laborious time getting college students to simply accept the concept that there’s democracy.”
Shopping for political energy is nothing new – however Musk’s brazenness is totally different
American politics has at all times been dominated by its most well-heeled residents, whether or not by holding workplace themselves, utilizing their cash to get their most well-liked candidates into workplace, or serving to form insurance policies. Benefactors are sometimes well-rewarded with entry to the levers of presidency, whether or not it’s receiving a comfortable ambassadorship and even cupboard place, getting beneficiant authorities contracts, performing as casual advisers, steering controversial international coverage selections, or taking up a extra shadowy however no much less influential function.
Whereas each Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris loved an abundance of ultra-rich supporters, simply 10 billionaires gave 44 p.c of all the cash supporting Trump. It’s a part of why the phrase “oligarchy” is being thrown round, though not for the primary time. “Going again greater than 2,000 years in historical past, oligarch has at all times referred to people who find themselves empowered by super wealth,” explains Winters. “That’s at all times a small a part of the inhabitants, however they’re in a position to convert their wealth into political affect.”
Musk donated some $130 million to assist elect Trump and different Republicans, and he doesn’t have an official appointment within the Trump administration at this level — as a substitute, he’ll be main the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE for brief) alongside fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The dual heads of the effectivity fee goal to cut at the least $2 trillion in authorities waste — such because the budgets of pesky regulatory businesses that decelerate constructing and launching rockets. (It’s value noting that there’s already an company tasked with making an attempt to make sure the federal authorities runs effectively.)
Barbara A. Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral Historical past Program on the College of Virginia’s Miller Middle, tells Vox that she will’t consider one other instance in American historical past fairly like Musk. “It simply appears that Musk is taking a a lot bigger function than every other one who would have come near taking part in his function,” she says. Musk doesn’t have earlier expertise in the same political appointment, neither is he stepping down from any of his corporations regardless of doubtlessly wielding a number of sway over businesses that regulate his companies.
Again in 2016, the massive Trump donor drawing scrutiny was hedge fund supervisor Robert Mercer. The Mercer household gave over $15 million to help Trump’s run, and their appreciable funding within the right-wing information website Breitbart was influential in selling Trump’s presidential candidacy. The parallels to Musk are hanging, given his possession of social media website X and the function it performed in spreading right-wing conspiracies and misinformation to voters, in addition to the proprietor’s specific Trump endorsements.
However Mercer’s contributions got here behind the scenes. He’s hardly given interviews, and little is thought about his private life. That’s the case for the overwhelming majority of rich donors — it’s Elon Musk, posting incessantly on X about how he sees the world, who’s the outlier.
Musk might be an indication of how billionaire political technique is altering
In Billionaires and Stealth Politics, revealed in 2018 within the aftermath of the primary Trump election, Seawright and fellow Northwestern researchers Matthew J. Lacombe and Benjamin I. Web page studied how this tiny subset of the super-rich engaged in political exercise. What they discovered is that whereas most by no means communicate publicly about their views, conservative billionaires tended to spend more cash whereas talking much less; liberal billionaires spent much less, however they had been extra more likely to communicate up.
Take Mark Cuban, who grew to become some of the seen billionaire boosters of Harris this yr however made a degree to say he didn’t donate in any respect to her marketing campaign. On the flip aspect, whereas Musk received all the eye as a Republican megadonor this cycle, the precise prime donor was a person you might need by no means heard of: Timothy Mellon, a banking inheritor who the general public is aware of little about.
Stealth has just about been the modus operandi for so long as wealthy People have been placing their fingers on the size of democracy — till Musk got here alongside.
Musk isn’t the one vocally partisan conservative billionaire donor in the present day, although — there are additionally figures like hedge fund supervisor Invoice Ackman and crypto traders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss who don’t have any qualms about sharing their politics on-line — however he’s essentially the most emblematic of this shift. Musk isn’t simply Trump’s monetary backer and the media mogul behind an more and more instrumental arm of right-wing messaging — he’s an influencer with a following that the majority politicians working for workplace in all probability want they commanded.
Company executives in the present day are greater than bosses. They’re thought leaders who publish memoirs providing broad classes on how to achieve life and are sometimes propped up as idols. Musk is the prime instance. Although he has now misplaced a few of his authentic admirers, his phrase remains to be gospel to a horde of largely younger males who suppose Musk will struggle again towards the liberal institution. It’s spurred on by an ecosystem of social media fan accounts circulating his wisest quotes, idyllic AI-generated photographs of him reaching faux heroic feats, and above all, by Musk’s personal phrases as he holds forth on his private X account. On X, Musk presently has over 200 million followers; at a Trump city corridor that Musk hosted in October in Pennsylvania, it was clear that at the least a part of the group had come to get a glimpse of the well-known billionaire.
The character of Musk’s public persona is essential, too: Like Trump, he portrays himself as a populist who understands your frustrations. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was framed as a treatment to “faux information” pushed by legacy media shops, purporting to create a city sq. that reinforces all voices. Based on Musk, even the budget-cut concepts for DOGE will probably be crowdsourced (with the help of volunteers keen to work 80-plus hours every week without spending a dime) and broadcast on X. The richest individual on the planet presents as a person of the individuals.
Some would possibly argue that Musk is “no totally different than the type of oligarch that we see in lots of different international locations,” says Benjamin Soskis, a historian and senior analysis affiliate on the City Institute’s Middle on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. “What I feel is totally different about it’s that Musk is doing this within the full glare of public regard, and with a type of presumed democratic legitimacy to it.”
For his followers, in different phrases, Musk’s place because the incoming president’s right-hand man isn’t the soiled maneuvering of a billionaire utilizing cash to entry energy. It reads nearly as a “philanthropic dedication” and an instance of “do-gooding,” says Soskis. (Musk has famously not been very philanthropic.) If the noblesse oblige of billionaires prior to now manifested in founding libraries and hospitals, Musk exhibits it by claiming to be a voice for the individuals — a megaphone for his or her anger and resentment.
When requested why a billionaire like Musk could be so snug saying their political worldview, Seawright provides one principle: Perhaps there are thresholds of wealth the place the results — like public backlash or dropping a couple of billion {dollars} — simply don’t matter that a lot.
In that case, that has worrying implications for the trajectory of American society. Our billionaires are definitely having fun with never-before-seen heights of wealth. Tesla’s inventory has soared since Election Day, with Musk’s private internet value now hovering round $300 billion. But it surely’s value noting that the start of the centibillionaire may be very current; Musk, together with many different tech leaders, noticed his fortune balloon in the course of the pandemic. In 2019, he was value a relatively paltry $22 billion — which is about half of what he paid to purchase Twitter in 2022.
Musk is unprecedented merely for the truth that there has by no means been a political donor, adviser, and movie star all rolled into one with the gravitational pull of a $300 billion fortune. Whereas wealth has at all times purchased you entry in America, Musk is among the most unsubtle examples we’ve ever seen. And for all the fear one would possibly really feel upon witnessing him waltz into the White Home, there’s one thing instructive about it, too. It lays naked the mechanism of energy in American democracy within the starkest phrases.