In the last speech of his presidency, US President Joe Biden described the US the way he usually only describes the nation’s adversaries: as an oligarchy. His fears about “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” came after weeks of discussion of the influence of the mega-rich on US president-elect Donald Trump’s administration. At least 13 billionaires are set to have government posts under the new president, with his expected cabinet worth at least US$7 billion, double that of his first term and an astonishing 60 times more than the net worth of Biden’s. Tallying in Trump’s close adviser, businessman Elon Musk, bloats the figure to more than a half trillion. Wealth and power have long had a happy marriage in the US. What is different now? It can be captured in three terms: scale, sector and strategy.
One thing about billionaires in the US is they keep making more of them. In 1990, there were about 60. Ten years later, there were 298. Today there are almost 750, enough to fill a pair of jumbo jets (assuming some could be persuaded to travel in economy). Billionaire status is no longer enough to make you a household name. Those with the Scrooge McDuck or John D. Rockefeller status of people “so rich they are famous for being rich” are more properly identified as centibillionaires: people worth more than US$100 billion.
Of the top 10 centibillionaires in the US, all but one (investor Warren Buffett) made their money in the tech sector that has boomed since the turn of the millennium. In his speech, Biden tweaked former US president Dwight Eisenhower’s warning from 1961 about the “military industrial complex” to raise the alarm about a “tech-industrial complex.” Unmentioned by either was the longstanding financial-industrial complex. Over the past several decades, the revolving door in US politics spat you out in one place more often than others: Wall Street. And the overlap between the private sector and the governing class was long dominated by one investment bank in particular, Goldman Sachs.
Then-Goldman cochair Robert Rubin was former US president Bill Clinton’s US secretary of the treasury, Goldman CEO Henry Paulson filled the same role for former US president George W. Bush, overseeing the 2008 bailout (and its friendly terms given to his confreres in finance). Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn joined Trump’s first cabinet from Goldman Sachs, too. To some extent, the pattern still holds. The commerce and treasury departments are expected to be led by billionaires from the world of investment banking — one even made his fortune with the famous-for-being-rich George Soros.
However, the more eye-catching arrivals in Washington are the ones from Silicon Valley. Tech figures such as venture capitalist David Sacks — tapped to be “artificial intelligence [AI] and crypto tsar” in Trump’s cabinet — and Musk, slated to head the advisory “department of government efficiency,” walk the trail blazed by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who placed a risky bet on supporting Trump in 2016, back when those such as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos were loudly criticizing him.
When Trump takes to the dais to be sworn in for the second time as president of the US, he would be flanked not only by those erstwhile critics, but also somewhat more surprisingly by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, head of a company slated to be made illegal by Biden. Long the dominant actor in the White House, Wall Street seems to have found a peer now among the tech titans.
That brings us to the question of strategy. What does Silicon Valley want? The easy answer would be that they want what business moguls always want: regulation that serves their interests, paths cleared to mergers and acquisitions, the crushing of the antitrust efforts and AI constraints rolled out by the Biden presidency, a decreased share of profits to labor, and, of course, lower corporate and personal income taxes. Set to expire this year, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — his only major piece of legislation — would likely be made permanent, a cash IV drip into the arms of the nation’s wealthiest.
They would also want to reap the usual fruits of federal contracts. Start-up weapons manufacturers such as the Thiel-backed Anduril have challenged the incumbent arms giants of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others. Thiel’s own Palantir is contracting its analytical tools to the US Department of Defense as well as police departments in the US and worldwide. Musk’s SpaceX has been NASA’s satellite launch provider for more than a decade and would love to have Trump’s tariff-threat battering ram open more markets for X.com, Starlink satellite Internet, Tesla electric vehicles, and eventual robo-taxis and lorries.
So far, that looks like standard practice for the convergence of corporate and political power in the US that we saw in the 20th century. However, at the edges, there are hints of something more radical. The same Silicon Valley figures who are to share the podium with Trump have long professed a basic antagonism towards the state as such. Some in their circle, such as venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, have even laid out detailed blueprints for “exiting” the nation state, including the creation of new private polities or “network states.”
In 2009, Thiel fantasized about cracking up the world map into thousands of new nations. “If we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries,” he said.
Musk’s move toward what some libertarians call “soft secession” in rebooting the idea of the “company town” in Texas — and speaking at length about escaping the planet altogether to Mars with a select few companions — suggests a new kink in the latest dalliance of the US’ wealthy and powerful. Some of those oligarchs seem not particularly tied to the legacy US at all. Perhaps their affiliations are as peripatetic as their companies that “domicile” themselves wherever the tax burden is the lightest.
The second coming of Make America Great Again might also be the rise to power of some of the people least committed to any given patch of territory, and the most willing to flee when a more opportune partner presents itself. It is not for nothing that the cantankerous ethnonationalist Steve Bannon has (rhetorically) declared war on Musk and others. Bannon’s calls in 2016 for adamantine borders, decoupling from China and the breakup of Big Tech are far from the language of the Silicon Valley right. They learned from the first four years that Trump has the developer’s talent of making deals with other rich people.
Biden should be commended for realizing on his way out that the threat the US faces is less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line. It is too bad neither he nor his party did enough to fight it when they had their years in power.
Quinn Slobodian is the author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.
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