Elon Musk and the age of shameless oligarchy

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have become an inseparable duo. Since Trump’s reelection, the richest man in the world — and one of Trump’s top campaign donors — has been a shadow trailing him at his Florida residence. The tech billionaire has taken center stage in the incoming administration, promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget.

A whirlwind relationship developing between a politician — in this case, the president-elect — and a financial backer isn’t unusual. What stands out is how much the donor himself is in the spotlight. Tim Walz’s joke that Musk, not JD Vance, was Trump’s running mate, rings more true every day. “We’ve never really seen anyone be that directly connected with a campaign unless they were the candidate,” says Jason Seawright, a political science professor at Northwestern University and co-author of Billionaires and Stealth Politics. 

It makes Musk an oddity among his billionaire class, who almost always use their influence quietly. 

He’s showing other members of the ultra-wealthy a bold alternative to stealth politics, urged on by a president-elect who has embraced giving billionaires a seat at the table. A private citizen can grab power in full view of the public — as long as they’re rich enough, and have enough fans.

“We are in an era that I call ‘in-your-face oligarchy,’” says Jeffrey A. Winters, a professor at Northwestern who researches oligarchs and inequality. Twenty years ago, it was a challenge to get his students to understand that there were oligarchs in the US. Now, he says, “I have a very hard time getting students to accept the idea that there’s democracy.”

Buying political power is nothing new – but Musk’s brazenness is different

American politics has always been dominated by its most well-heeled citizens, whether by holding office themselves, using their money to get their preferred candidates into office, or helping shape policies. Benefactors are often well-rewarded with access to the levers of government, whether it’s receiving a cushy ambassadorship or even cabinet position, getting generous government contracts, acting as informal advisers, steering controversial foreign policy decisions, or taking on a more shadowy but no less influential role.  

While both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris enjoyed an abundance of ultra-rich supporters, just 10 billionaires gave 44 percent of all the money supporting Trump. It’s part of why the word “oligarchy” is being thrown around, although not for the first time. “Going back more than 2,000 years in history, oligarch has always referred to people who are empowered by tremendous wealth,” explains Winters. “That’s always a small part of the population, but they’re able to convert their wealth into political influence.”

Musk donated some $130 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and he doesn’t have an official appointment in the Trump administration at this point — instead, he’ll be leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE for short) alongside fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The twin heads of the efficiency commission aim to chop at least $2 trillion in government waste — such as the budgets of pesky regulatory agencies that slow down building and launching rockets. (It’s worth noting that there’s already an agency tasked with trying to ensure the federal government runs efficiently.) 

Barbara A. Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, tells Vox that she can’t think of another example in American history quite like Musk. “It just seems that Musk is taking a much larger role than any other person who would have come close to playing his role,” she says. Musk doesn’t have previous experience in a similar political appointment, nor is he stepping down from any of his companies despite potentially wielding a lot of sway over agencies that regulate his firms.

Back in 2016, the big Trump donor drawing scrutiny was hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. The Mercer family gave over $15 million to support Trump’s run, and their considerable investment in the right-wing news site Breitbart was influential in promoting Trump’s presidential candidacy. The parallels to Musk are striking, given his ownership of social media site X and the role it played in spreading right-wing conspiracies and misinformation to voters, as well as the owner’s explicit Trump endorsements.

But Mercer’s contributions came behind the scenes. He’s hardly ever given interviews, and little is known about his personal life. That’s the case for the vast majority of wealthy donors — it’s Elon Musk, posting incessantly on X about how he sees the world, who’s the outlier.

Musk could be a sign of how billionaire political strategy is changing

In Billionaires and Stealth Politics, published in 2018 in the aftermath of the first Trump election, Seawright and fellow Northwestern researchers Matthew J. Lacombe and Benjamin I. Page studied how this tiny subset of the super-rich engaged in political activity. What they found is that while most never speak publicly about their views, conservative billionaires tended to spend more money while speaking less; liberal billionaires spent less, but they were more likely to speak up.

Take Mark Cuban, who became one of the most visible billionaire boosters of Harris this year but made a point to say he didn’t donate at all to her campaign. On the flip side, while Musk got all the attention as a Republican megadonor this cycle, the actual top donor was a man you might have never heard of: Timothy Mellon, a banking heir who the public knows little about. 

Stealth has pretty much been the modus operandi for as long as rich Americans have been putting their fingers on the scale of democracy — until Musk came along. 

Musk isn’t the only vocally partisan conservative billionaire donor today, though — there are also figures like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and crypto investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss who have no qualms about sharing their politics online — but he is the most emblematic of this shift. Musk isn’t just Trump’s financial backer and the media mogul behind an increasingly instrumental arm of right-wing messaging — he’s an influencer with a following that most politicians running for office probably wish they commanded. 

Corporate executives today are more than bosses. They’re thought leaders who publish memoirs offering broad lessons on how to succeed in life and are often propped up as idols.  Musk is the prime example. Though he has now lost some of his original admirers, his word is still gospel to a horde of mostly young men who think Musk will fight back against the liberal establishment. It’s spurred on by an ecosystem of social media fan accounts circulating his wisest quotes, idyllic AI-generated images of him achieving fake heroic feats, and above all, by Musk’s own words as he holds forth on his personal X account. On X, Musk currently has over 200 million followers; at a Trump town hall that Musk hosted in October in Pennsylvania, it was clear that at least part of the crowd had come to get a glimpse of the famous billionaire.

The nature of Musk’s public persona is important, too: Like Trump, he portrays himself as a populist who understands your frustrations. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was framed as a remedy to “fake news” pushed by legacy media outlets, purporting to create a town square that boosts all voices. According to Musk, even the budget-cut ideas for DOGE will be crowdsourced (with the aid of volunteers willing to work 80-plus hours a week for free) and broadcast on X. The richest person in the world presents as a man of the people.

Some might argue that Musk is “no different than the kind of oligarch that we see in many other countries,” says Benjamin Soskis, a historian and senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. “What I think is different about it is that Musk is doing this in the full glare of public regard, and with a kind of presumed democratic legitimacy to it.”

For his fans, in other words, Musk’s position as the incoming president’s right-hand man isn’t the dirty maneuvering of a billionaire using money to access power. It reads almost as a “philanthropic commitment” and an example of “do-gooding,” says Soskis. (Musk has famously not been very philanthropic.) If the noblesse oblige of billionaires in the past manifested in founding libraries and hospitals, Musk shows it by claiming to be a voice for the people — a megaphone for their anger and resentment.

When asked why a billionaire like Musk might be so comfortable announcing their political worldview, Seawright offers one theory: Maybe there are thresholds of wealth where the consequences — like public backlash or losing a few billion dollars —  just don’t matter that much.

If so, that has worrying implications for the trajectory of American society. Our billionaires are certainly enjoying never-before-seen heights of wealth. Tesla’s stock has soared since Election Day, with Musk’s personal net worth now hovering around $300 billion. But it’s worth noting that the birth of the centibillionaire is very recent; Musk, along with many other tech leaders, saw his fortune balloon during the pandemic. In 2019, he was worth a comparatively paltry $22 billion — which is about half of what he paid to buy Twitter in 2022. 

Musk is unprecedented simply for the fact that there has never been a political donor, adviser, and celebrity all rolled into one with the gravitational pull of a $300 billion fortune. While wealth has always bought you access in America, Musk is one of the most unsubtle examples we’ve ever seen. And for all the worry one might feel upon witnessing him waltz into the White House, there’s something instructive about it, too. It lays bare the mechanism of power in American democracy in the starkest terms.