The richest people in America have a radical plan. Emboldened by colossal profits and the intensity of the culture wars, they brought Donald Trump to the White House and have now become his closest bodyguard. Their promotion of libertarianism, space exploration and "anti-wokism" has one main goal: to overthrow American democracy. This is what David Bell, a professor of history at Princeton, writes in an article for the French online publication Le Grand Continent.
From Musk to Thiel, via Sachs, Yarvin and Andreessen, the president's people may be ready to cross the Rubicon. In the three days since Donald Trump was elected, Elon Musk's fortune jumped by $26.5 billion. That's about $100,000 per second. It then grew by nearly $125 billion. That's 750 times more than the $200 million Musk spent on Trump's campaign. With a performance like that, it's hardly surprising that he was thrilled with the election results. Trump appointed him to head the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), which aims to drastically reduce the size of the federal government. According to Musk and the man Trump nominated to co-head the department, Vivek Ramaswamy, the current administration's operations are undemocratic and impose "enormous direct and indirect costs on taxpayers." The taxpayer who will save the most from this regulatory cutback will be Elon Musk himself - and that could make him the world's first "trillionaire".
But Musk is just the tip of the iceberg, the most famous and recognizable of the ultra-rich oligarchs who supported Donald Trump's return to power and who are now on the front lines to reap the financial benefits of this operation and wield unprecedented political influence. Some of them, adhering to a mix of political ideas containing elements of Caesarism, technocracy and radical libertarianism, have no sympathy for democracy. Instead, they want to carry Silicon Valley's agenda of "creative destruction" (which can also be summarized as the desire to "break everything") to the very core of the American federal state.
American democracy is becoming an oligarchy
Excessive wealth has strange and impressive consequences. It isolates its owners from the ordinary world behind an impenetrable screen of bodyguards, servants, sycophants, limousines, helicopters, yachts, private jets, and private islands. This gives them an irresistible sense of their own genius and virtue. It makes them authoritarian and often power-hungry. And it ends up transforming them from ordinary tycoons into oligarchs. Despite having more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, oligarchs almost always want more. ProPublica reported that between 2014 and and 2018, even though Elon Musk’s fortune has grown by nearly $14 billion, he has paid an effective federal tax rate of just 3.3%, while continuing to fight regulations that he says prevent him from getting even richer. A similar complaint was made by his former partner Peter Thiel, who took advantage of a federal program designed for middle-class investors to completely exempt $5 billion in capital gains from taxes.
Oligarchs want to exert political influence—and their wealth allows them to do so. In the United States, since the Supreme Court struck down limits on campaign spending by corporations and outside groups in its 2010 decision in Citizens United, wealthy donors have made billions of dollars in campaign contributions and are waiting to get them back. Today, most American politicians no longer bother to pretend, as they once did, that their campaign contributions buy nothing more than political "access" - a word that seems strange and weak these days. It is now assumed and made clear that politicians vote on instructions.
But money also buys media. The most striking example is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which allowed him to bombard the platform’s 76 million American users in 2024 with a flood of pro-Trump advertising messages, as well as “informational” content heavily biased in favor of the Republican candidate. The use of media buying to foster unholy alliances between oligarchs and powerful representatives of the global reactionary right was inaugurated in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where businessmen affiliated with the ruling Fidesz party control about 80% of the country’s media and have almost completely silenced the opposition. In return, the Hungarian state, the country’s largest advertiser, allocates 90% of its advertising spending to these same businessmen. Donald Trump, an admirer of Orbán, may try to follow suit.
Joe Biden warned in his farewell speech last week that an oligarchy was “taking shape” in the United States. On this point, as on so many others, the president was far behind reality. We are already living in the age of the oligarch. The term first came into use in Russia, where the men in question (there were never any women) made their fortunes by plundering the vast natural resources of the former Soviet Union. It took the West longer to acknowledge the existence of a genuine oligarchic class. They have made their mark mainly in the digital economy or in investment funds, moving colossal sums more skillfully than anyone else - and taking their share of the pie.
In both cases, the scale of these new riches, both in terms of the economy as a whole and in terms of the wealth of ordinary people, is completely disproportionate to what could be observed in the past.
Similarly, the relationship between oligarchy and politics has developed differently in the East and the West. In Russia, in the first decade after communism, the first wave of oligarchs acquired considerable power and influence. But after coming to power, Vladimir Putin curtailed their independence: he forced some into exile, imprisoned others, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and subordinated the rest to his will. He also helped create a second wave of fiercely loyal oligarchs, some of them childhood friends, like the brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg.
In the United States, things played out a little differently. The men who made unprecedented wealth in the 1990s—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others—had little interest in fundamentally changing American politics. Bill Gates used some of his vast Microsoft fortune to create a charitable foundation, something Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, did a little later. Jobs, whose style was ostensibly inspired by the legacy of America’s counterculture, largely disdained politics. As for Bezos, he also kept a low political profile for many years. In 2013, he bought the Washington Post; four years later, in response to Trump's inauguration, the newspaper raised the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness".
From Thiel and Sachs to Elon Musk: How Palo Alto Ideologists Radicalized the "PayPal Mafia"
Things are different when a small group of men, some of whom were ideologically nurtured from a very young age, managed to shape the American oligarchy in its current form in two decades - the "PayPal Mafia". The term refers to a group of people who met at the financial services company PayPal in the late 1990s, a few years after the start of the dot-com bubble. PayPal itself, which was acquired by eBay in 2002, did not allow its founders to achieve the level of wealth necessary to form an oligarchy. The most famous of these, Elon Musk (who founded PayPal's predecessor, X.com), made $176 million from his purchase of eBay, a pittance by today's standards. The bulk of his colossal $415 billion fortune comes from shares in electric car company Tesla, in which he became majority shareholder in 2004. Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, turned an initial $500,000 stake in Facebook into a stake worth more than $1.5 billion and made many other smart investments in addition to founding the data analytics company Palantir, which takes its name from "The Lord of the Rings," one of his obsessions. David Sachs, another PayPal founder, created the genealogy website geni.com and made many other highly profitable investments in the technology sector.
Thiel and Sachs were the group's first ideologues - long before Elon Musk decided to get involved in politics. A brilliant philosophy student at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel was traumatized by the end of the hegemony of "Western culture" at his university, where protesters led by Jesse Jackson chanted the slogan "Western culture must go". In 1987, he founded the Stanford Review, part of a group of student publications at elite universities funded by conservative foundations. As a law student in the early 1990s, Thiel met Sachs, who became a contributor to the magazine. Both subsequently published a book strongly critical of political correctness and multiculturalism, entitled "The Diversity Myth", in which they specifically described the rape awareness movement as a pretext for vilifying men; they would later apologize for this. Still, their positions remain largely understood within the ideological framework of Reagan-era conservatism. But as Sachs has grown his fortune, his political evolution has begun to mirror that of the Republican Party as a whole. He now defines himself as a "populist" and a defender of the working class, and has funded many candidates who reflect this shift in the party. In 2024, he endorsed Ron DeSantis before finally embracing Trump's hegemony. After the election, he praised Trump for his "comprehensive campaign, based on issues like the border, inflation, crime and war. In his new administration, the president-elect appointed him the "czar" of cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. Similarly, Thiel's politics took a stranger and more sinister turn as he gained wealth and influence. In 2009, he published an article in Cato Unbound, the organ of an influential libertarian foundation in Washington, in which he stated, among other things, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Assessing the previous century of American history, he argued that "the 1920s were the last decade in American history in which one could be truly optimistic about politics.
But the expansion of the welfare state and women's suffrage - yes, women's suffrage - would then ensure the triumph of a "brainless demos". At the time, Thiel called on libertarians to abandon politics altogether and seek salvation in technology: through the Internet and space travel. He also wrote: "The fate of our world may depend on the efforts of one man who builds or spreads the machine of freedom." Thiel is an eccentric intellectual. He mixes ideas from libertarian science fiction, Tolkien, René Girard and Leo Strauss. More recently, he has become interested in the Apocalypse, worrying about the coming of a secular Antichrist. A recent column of his in the Financial Times gives a good idea of his deep eccentricity. Thiel also promotes the work of one of his protégés, blogger Curtis Yarvin, a key figure in a reactionary movement called the "Dark Enlightenment". Yarvin argues that what he calls "The Cathedral" - a vast conglomerate of major media outlets and universities - exercises totalitarian control in the United States through the manipulation of public opinion. A dictator or "monarch" would be the only way to destroy it.
The New Trumpist Alliance of America's Ultra-Rich
In 2016, Thiel decided it was irresponsible to stay out of politics and made a large donation to Donald Trump. A shock to the rest of Silicon Valley. But he quickly became disillusioned with the chaos of the Trump administration and its inability to overcome America's "senile center-left regime". He despairs that a "great man" might yet emerge to change the world. Journalist Barton Gelman wrote in a 2022 article about Thiel that "Thiel's libertarian critique of the American government has become an almost nihilistic impulse to overthrow it". But at the same time, he spared no effort and resources to foster the dazzling political career of a young lawyer he hired in 2017 to work at his investment firm: J.D. Vance. When Trump chose Vance as his vice president, Thiel was back on the scene: through Vance, he was now in a position to exert real influence in the new administration. Thiel is not the only Trump-supporting oligarch with deeply strange and illiberal ideas drawn from that dark corner of culture where science fiction, libertarianism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism collide. Then there is Marc Andreessen, the billionaire developer of the first commercial Internet browser.
Last year, he co-authored the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto", which professes an unabashed devotion to technology as the solution to all of humanity's problems, including a long passage from Nietzsche's "The Last Man." He attacks concepts like "sustainable development" and "social responsibility", which he associates with communism, and declares: "Our enemy is the ivory tower." The book also contains a section titled "Becoming a Technological Superman," which includes the following statements: "We believe in greatness... We believe in ambition, in aggression, in perseverance, in ruthlessness - in strength." He reportedly expressed supreme contempt for ordinary Americans: "I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep these people quiet." It's no surprise, then, that Andreessen was drawn to the hyper-aggressive candidate who believes above all in brute force and wants to "make America great again." After Trump's election, he advised the transition team and, along with several of Musk's aides, interviewed candidates for top government positions.
Many other oligarchs have made big donations to Donald Trump and are likely to enjoy his attention over the next four years. Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, has attended transition team meetings. So has Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire who has become radicalized by recent anti-Israel student protests, particularly at Harvard, his alma mater. He helped lead the movement that led to the ouster of university president Claudine Gay, whom he accused of protecting anti-Semites. There’s also Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right. Meanwhile, billionaire junk bond king Nelson Peltz gathered a bunch of Republican-leaning business figures at his $334 million Florida mansion in February to rally support for Trump, and Musk was a guest of honor at the event. Pharmaceutical mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, also joined Trump. At the end of the presidential campaign, he banned his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris and after the election promised to appoint a new editorial board that would be “fair and just” — a formula he not coincidentally adopted, borrowing the original slogan of Fox News. As for Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest people of the previous generation, he has already completed his political rapprochement with Trump. Despite potentially huge federal contracts for his data services, he intervened to block the Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris during the election. After Trump’s victory, Bezos published a congratulatory message to X. Most recently, the Post refused to print a cartoon showing Bezos bowing to Trump—leading to the cartoonist’s resignation. Mark Zuckerberg also welcomed Trump’s election, made large donations to the inauguration committee, and suspended fact-checking on Facebook, allowing right-wing propagandists to freely spread their lies.
Most of these figures have only a limited interest in the more outlandish theories being spread by Thiel, Yarvin, and Andreessen. What appeals to them most is the libertarian agenda they espouse, which includes the possible elimination of the income tax, the complete elimination of federal regulations, and the promotion of cryptocurrencies at the expense of the dollar—all with the ultimate goal of making them even richer. They fail to realize that there are differences between an administration and a company that can lay off thousands of workers to increase shareholder value. They believe that Silicon Valley ethics should apply equally to both the public and private sectors—they are much less interested in making the human race "multiplanetary".
Elon Musk: Politicization and the Rise of the "Co-President"
Unlike Thiel and Sachs, Musk does not have a long history as a libertarian or even a conservative. As early as 2015, he claimed that he was not interested in politics at all and that he had voted mostly for Democratic candidates in the presidential election. He also frequently warned about the dangers of climate change while inventing and developing the world's most famous electric car brand, Tesla. But as this highly eccentric man's fortune grew to colossal proportions, his messianic ambitions grew. Above all, Musk dreams of colonizing space - starting with Mars - seeing it as the only way to ensure the survival of humanity. In 2001, he founded SpaceX, a company that seeks to drastically reduce the cost of transporting equipment into low-Earth orbit. A necessary step for future space exploration. Musk also promised to develop a new tunneling technology to enable a radically new high-speed rail transport. He also founded a company that aims to connect the human brain directly to the internet. More recently, he has become an ardent pro-natalist, frustrated by the low birth rate in developed countries and insisting on the need for "super-intelligent" people to reproduce more. He himself has twelve children by several women — three of whom are named X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Techno Mechanicus.
At the dawn of our twentieth century, three events profoundly radicalized Elon Musk. The first was the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent quarantine measures. In March 2020, Musk wrote on Twitter that "the coronavirus panic is stupid". A month later, he called the restrictions imposed to deal with the rapid spread of the virus "fascist". Back in May, he announced that he would reopen Tesla's production lines despite the restrictions. In 2021, under pressure from the United Auto Workers union — which tried, unsuccessfully, to unionize Tesla employees — President Biden declined to invite Musk to a White House meeting on electric vehicles.
More importantly, that same year, Musk’s transgender child by his first wife severed all ties with his father and officially changed his name. Musk blames this on the "wake-up virus", which he calls "one of the greatest threats to modern civilization." He is increasingly convinced that the mainstream media is stifling free speech and allowing this "virus" to spread. It is this belief that led him to buy Twitter in late 2022, rename it X in 2023, open it up to all sorts of far-right conspiracy theories, and use it to promote Donald Trump’s campaign. By becoming a fanatical Trump supporter and a regular visitor to Mar-a-Lago, he has changed his previous views on climate change. During the presidential transition, he attended numerous meetings with Trump and even held talks with foreign leaders.
Trump and the global power of the techno-Caesars
At this stage, however, it is difficult to say exactly how much influence the oligarchs will have on Donald Trump during his second term. He won the election largely because of his appeal among uneducated working-class voters, whose interests at first glance seem different from those of the richest people. Does Trump risk losing their support? We know that the president-elect is primarily concerned with the image he projects in the media, through his approval ratings and the size of the crowds he draws. As a businessman, he tends to measure his success by the stock market. After all, he may pay more attention to the Dow Jones stock price and Gallup polls than to the Elon Musk memes and Peter Thiel prophecies that Vice President J.D. Vance will defend.
Republicans may pander to the oligarchs for the money they give to their campaigns, but there is still no indication that techno-caesarism has any real appeal to party workers. For all the financial gains he hopes to reap, Elon Musk may not have the patience or humility to play courtier for long in Trump’s chaotic and ruthless world. He already lost a major battle when the president-elect refused to nominate his favorite, Howard Lutnick, for Treasury secretary. Moreover, Musk and other oligarchs have little sympathy for Donald Trump’s latest imperialist ambitions: the annexation of Canada and Greenland. Despite Trump’s extreme deregulation plans, the federal government is not a business whose employees can be fired and its charter rewritten at the whim of the CEO.
After prominent figures in the MAGA movement recently attacked Musk for his defense of the practice of granting preferential visa status to highly skilled immigrants, he backed down. Economist Branko Milanovic summed up the ideology of Musk and the oligarchs united around Trump with the term "global Caesarism". According to him, many of them are not truly attached to a particular nation-state, but instead believe in the supremacy of a supranational global elite - it is not surprising that many of them are ardent supporters of cryptocurrencies and even hope that one day they will displace the dollar. They cynically exploit nationalism to elect their preferred candidates, but otherwise seek only to keep the lower classes obedient with bread and spectacle. For them, an American invasion of Greenland is not on the agenda. Yet some elements of the oligarchs’ ideas and policy proposals seem to have surprisingly broad appeal, both among the disenchanted and disaffected post-industrial working class and among the disillusioned young people who voted for Trump in surprisingly large numbers.
The idea of challenging “the system” and dismantling much of the federal government doesn’t sound so bad to many people living in fentanyl-ravaged communities, unable to afford decent housing and paying astronomical prices for food. Drawing their political information largely from social media, alternative podcasts, and heavily biased private television and radio stations like Fox News, they see “the system” as rigged against them, dominated by incompetent Democrats who care more about immigrants and transgender people than they do about ordinary, patriotic Americans. This set of beliefs is summed up in the Trump campaign’s most successful TV ad: “Kamala for them, President Trump for you.”
What these sources fail to note, in particular, is that a massive federal government shutdown would threaten the food stamps, disability benefits, Social Security, and Medicare that many of these voters still depend on. In 2010, protesters against the Affordable Care Act held signs that read “Hands off the government from my health insurance.” As for the “techno-optimism” of the Sunday Nietzscheans, it has found an enthusiastic audience among young Americans, often cryptocurrency holders, who today band together under the name “Tech Bros.” Fans of podcaster Joe Rogan and the far-right internet "philosopher" known as the "Bronze Age Pervert", they glorify bodybuilding, extreme sports such as MMA, "Paleolithic" diets - based, among other things, on raw beef liver -, dubious health supplements and survival. Their culture is homoerotic, deeply misogynistic - they encourage women to stay home and adopt a "traditional" lifestyle - and tainted by all manner of conspiracy theories. Part of their imagination is focused on an imagined image of ancient Rome - similar to "Caesar's Palace" in Las Vegas. An aesthetic that culminates in the chaotic use of capital Latin letters in the slogan "RETVRN". Needless to say, they would be happy to see an American Caesar emerge—they would have to settle for Caligula. It’s hard to gauge the scale of the phenomenon, but Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the United States today, has 14.5 million Spotify subscribers.
Even if this public support proves fleeting, Musk, Thiel, and their followers have already implanted radically anti-democratic ideas into the upper echelons of the American government, some of which are completely at odds with the principles on which American society is founded.
The very fact that their ideology has gained any credibility in mainstream Republican circles—and among some segments of the general public—should worry us. A major crisis, which Trump’s ignorant and stubborn style of governing makes all too likely, could give them a new meaning—even to the point of crossing the line. For now, no techno-Caesar stands near the shores of the American Rubicon. But who knows what will happen in a few years? Money decides everything, and American oligarchs have more of it than Croesus himself could dream of.