How America Could Become an Oligarchy Ruled by the Rich

Outgoing US President Joe Biden used his farewell 15-minute White House address to lay out a model for a peaceful transition of power and raise concerns about his successor, Donald Trump, without mentioning his name.

Biden warned of a dangerous oligarchy of unaccountable billionaires forming around the new president, which threatens Americans’ basic rights and freedoms.

Biden’s attack on the super-rich tech industry was a thinly hidden signal to Silicon Valley CEOs such as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close Trump confidant who has provided massive financial support to his campaign.

The term ‘Oligarchy’ refers to a government run by a handful of people for their own gain.

The concerns come after tech leaders such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg made concerted efforts to improve relations with Trump ahead of his return to the White House.

“The United States is moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society,” Senator Bernie Sanders told NBC.

By one estimate, he is assembling the richest set of advisers and Cabinet members in American history, worth a collective $450 billion.

Dangerous Oligarchy

On January 15, outgoing US President Joe Biden warned of the danger of an oligarchy forming in America, noting that Americans are drowning in a torrent of misleading news, which threatens to abuse power.

He explained that the U.S. is facing a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a handful of wealthy people, describing it as a direct threat to democracy and the fundamental values that the American people hold dear.

Biden stressed that misleading news poses a great danger, saying that this situation could lead to dangerous consequences if the abuse of power is not stopped.

He added that these challenges require Americans to be vigilant to preserve democracy and the unity of the country in the face of these growing threats.

Biden’s speech was strikingly similar to former President Dwight Eisenhower’s final address in 1961, when he warned the nation of the rise of a military-industrial complex.

“I am equally concerned about the potential rise of a techno-industrial complex that could pose real risks to our country as well,” Biden added.

The outgoing US president said that “the massive tax cuts for billionaires should be repealed, saying they need to pay their fair share.”

He also said that the government should eliminate the flow of hidden money to political campaigns, and ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

Biden’s warning as he left the White House could be attributed to political reasons, but there is no disputing the fact that wealthy businessmen have rallied around new President Donald Trump.

Even before Biden’s address, the rising wealth gap in the United States raised concerns about whether the world's largest economy was becoming oligarchy.

Prominent Trump Supporters

As Trump's inauguration approaches, major tech companies are competing to secure a place within the entourage of new US President Donald Trump.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais expects that the next stage will witness a significant improvement in relations between major tech companies and the White House.

Trump appointed Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X, to a new ministry concerned with government efficiency whose mission is to reduce waste, after he became a key ally during the election campaign.

After helping to finance the campaign against Kamala Harris (more than $100 million), Musk became a key player in the inner circle, appearing at public dinners and other events with Trump more than his wife Melania.

But he was not the only tech mogul to take this step: Apple CEO Tim Cook personally donated about $1 million to the new president's inauguration.

That’s the same amount that Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, and companies like Meta, Amazon, and Perplexity have donated.

There’s also been movement behind the scenes, with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, removing cartoons that depicted Bezos and the other aforementioned businessmen kneeling to Trump.

For his part, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently put prominent Trump supporters in senior positions within the company.

He also announced a major change to his platforms: Instagram and Facebook will remove third-party content verification and replace it with a community comment system similar to X.

Meta’s change of course on its content moderation policy reflects the tech industry’s desire to win Trump’s favor, while observers see it as a capitulation to the new US president.

It is worth noting that on January 7, 2021, Zuckerberg deleted Trump's accounts following his supporters' attack on the Capitol.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais explained that Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech moguls have many reasons to stand by Trump.

No matter how unpredictable and impulsive the new White House president may be, his party controls Congress and the Supreme Court.

During Biden’s administration, investigations have been opened into Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple for antitrust practices.

Trump has already said that breaking up these companies would be too dangerous because he wants to have great companies that can compete with China.

With the exception of Musk’s companies, tech companies would be wrong to assume that they will have the unconditional support of the White House.

According to Cilia Rikap, Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, the Trump team has a divided view of these companies.

In the same context, many Republicans are wary of big tech. Among them is Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who initially expressed support for the oversight of tech companies by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Immense Influence

As owner of SpaceX, Musk is already one of the largest contractors to the U.S. government, and as owner of Tesla, he is at the forefront of America's efforts to win the electric car race.

As owner of the social networking site X, he has turned the platform into a mouthpiece for voices that favor Trump.

In this context, the German website Telepolis revealed that Musk's empire is increasingly penetrating the field of military contracts with the Pentagon.

He explained that this is happening by sending military satellites, and also by creating a military version of his communications system Starlink, which was used to provide reliable military internet service to the Ukrainian army in its conflict with Russia.

In the future, he noted, the Starship system, which can carry massive payloads into space, could become SpaceX’s biggest financial engine, a capability the U.S. military is seeking to develop in preparation for a potential conflict with China.

Lorenzo Castellania, a history professor at Rome's Luiss University, said the U.S. has distinct oligarchical traditions.

“I don't think it is fair to compare Musk to the oligarchs of authoritarian regimes. I think instead he fits into a very American historical typology, such as the robber barons who appeared on the political scene in the late 19th and early 20th century,” he added.

America has experienced oligarchy before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At the time, the United States did not have much of a middle class. 

A century later, a second oligarchy emerged of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. 

Although the likes of Carnegie and Morgan wielded enormous influence over US democracy, they also created untold wealth for the economy, leaving legacies ranging from soaring public buildings to entire industries.

They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output, corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, and generated unprecedented levels of inequality and poverty, which is why they earned the sobriquet robber barons.

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s sapped much of the robber barons’ wealth. 

In 1933, after the elections of Teddy Roosevelt, coupled with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, most of their power was eliminated.

For the next half-century, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

Starting around 1980, a third American oligarchy emerged. Since then, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled.

The richest 130,000 American families now own nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent — 117 million families — combined.

The three richest Americans — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — own as much as the entire bottom half of the population.