America Belongs to the Billionaires Now

I’m sure it was driving Mark Zuckerberg nuts to watch Elon Musk quickly position himself by President-elect Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago in the weeks after the election, effectively cementing himself as Trump’s billionaire co-president.

Of course, Musk had many reasons to get into bed with the Trump regime. He’s a billionaire because of government policy - the government contracts for his engines, the government subsidies for his cars, the government’s trade policy that allows him to make half his cars in China without penalty. And he knows that Trump’s administration will give him more billions if he’s nice.

Zuckerberg’s Meta has only slightly fewer reasons to care about being in Trump’s favor. A FTC case is pending in federal court to punish Facebook for many of its anti-competitive practices. Trump could make that suit vanish. And its future ability to lead on artificial intelligence is dependent on whether government regulation favors one player over another.

So Zuckerberg paraded down to Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving to work out a deal with Trump. He arrived back at Meta headquarters with an urgent do-out: his team was to take down Facebook fact-checking processes as soon as possible. Normally changing a major Facebook policy involves a careful internal vetting process, but as a New York Times expose explained, “Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.” Why? Because Trump had given his orders and Zuckerberg, trying to keep up with Musk’s dizzying sycophancy, had to act fast. Trump even admitted that Zuckerberg’s actions were “probably” an attempt to curry favor after previous threats Trump had made against Zuckerberg’s perceived anti-Trump bias.

This isn’t how our government is supposed to work. Until now. What you are watching is the construction of an oligarchy, where a handful of crazy rich, self-interested billionaires work with an elected leader to grab power so that the government works to enrich the small cabal of wealthy insiders and no one else. And what makes this particular oligarchy so worrying is that the companies that are folding into the Trump Administration are the tech and media companies - the very institutions that control the flow of information. They decide what news gets spread and who sees it. If they’re in Trump’s pocket, they’ll make sure nothing that contradicts his narrative sees the light of day.

This is made possible by a confluence of factors. First, the entire American economy, and in particular the American information economy, has become dangerously consolidated. Twitter, Meta, Google, and TikTok own a controlling share of the U.S. news and information ecosystem. Changes they make in what news is covered and what news is boosted can move the minds of tens of millions of citizens. Trump knows that if he can influence the decisions of these four companies - and get them to either parrot his message or suppress criticism of his administration - he can bury his political opposition.

But these companies would not, under normal circumstances, be so willing to change their practices to please an American president. Normally, the rule of law and some semblance of merit determine how a particular company is treated. But not in Trump world. Trump unapologetically trades favors with the private sector, responds to praise not merit, and uses his control over his massive following to crush companies that refuse to bend the knee. Every policy is a transaction.

With the online media market so consolidated, and companies motivated by money and profit instead of truth or the common good, no player can afford to fall behind. Thus, Musk’s fawning obedience to Trump demanded that Zuckerberg and other would-be oligarchs, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others line up to get their piece of the pie. Especially when Bezos’ BlueOrigin is competing with SpaceX for government contracts, Google is awaiting a decision in the DOJ’s case over their monopoly on search, and Apple is hoping to avoid new tariffs on the iPhone. If an oligarchy is forming, and profit is the only thing that matters, no tech billionaire wants to miss out on the chance to get even richer.

I know this all sounds like alarmist hyperbole, but let’s be honest - every democracy and every civilization has an expiration date. And that expiration date, though unknown, always comes sooner when citizens deny that they are living in the final days. Curiously, and concerningly, many in the political mainstream refuse to acknowledge that the MAGA right has adopted a powerful and widespread intellectual argument that American democracy is too weak and irrelevant to last very much further into the twenty-first century. The shaman of this proud, anti-democratic strain inside the new right, Curtis Yarvin, just did a long, glossy coming out interview with the New York Times, titled “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done”, as if to signal that the underground planning for the death of democracy is now, upon Trump’s second inauguration, going mainstream. J.D. Vance is a fan of Yavin’s work, as are Musk and the billionaire greedy tech-bros who will have massive influence in the second Trump White House.

And the fastest way to destroy a democracy is to turn the media into a mouthpiece for the regime. Sometimes with small but determinative changes in editorial and filtering policy. Sometimes with big, bold moves (witness Trump’s plan, unveiled yesterday, to use taxpayer money to give Trump a 50% controlling stake in TikTok).

I get it: it’s easier to get through every day - even for elected officials - if you just assume the best instead of the worst. If you choose to believe that all this is smoke and not fire. If you just chalk it all up to the usual Trump bluster instead of the actual, planned conversion of American democracy to American oligarchy. But I am of the opinion that the end of the story certainly isn’t written yet. We have the power to put a stop to the burgeoning oligarchy. But only if democracy’s defenders start describing the events we are witnessing accurately and start ringing the alarm bells loudly and urgently.