Their unlimited and growing power helps explain the current electoral mess.
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Everyone has their favorite nominee for our biggest worry — from inflation to immigrants to the MAGA crowd. I’d argue it is actually something we constantly discuss but don’t do anything about: egomaniacal billionaires who can never have enough money or power.
They are the biggest and most existential threat to this country.
As increasingly observed — but not really reckoned with — we see that many mega-tycoons are doing everything they can to distort reality and help Donald Trump win.
They wield disproportionate influence not only as a product of their wealth but also because of the specific structure of the US electoral system and the stacked-court decision in Citizens United that opened the floodgates to their resources.
Just as German industrialists and international financiers, hoping to make gains under — and certainly afraid of — Hitler, were complicit in his rise to power, so too are billionaires in this country. They are making the Trump disaster possible and perhaps inevitable.
America has a long history with this dynamic. Doing business with Washington is a key aspect of getting rich and becoming richer.
When Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided the paper would not make its usual presidential endorsement, angry Post reporters published articles pointing out that a huge percentage of his business comes from federal contracts. With the Democrats in power, he already has those juicy sales. But he is clearly worried by Trump’s threats of retribution if he is elected.
These are our true rulers. These are the people who traffic in and pay for the disinformation that is tearing this country apart.
In addition, associates of Bezos have revealed that he is a libertarian who wants low taxes, and that all he cares about is wealth accumulation and unregulated commerce — and more public monies headed his way.
Meanwhile, another billionaire media tycoon, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, has roiled the newsroom by similarly preventing his paper from issuing its usual endorsement this year.
And of course there is always Elon Musk, America’s biggest welfare queen.
Musk is, as has been made manifest, even worse than the others, by a country mile. In his aggressive offensive to ensure Trump’s victory, he has been saturating battleground states with one lie after another so extensively that election officials find it impossible to fact check him in real time.
His 200 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, amplify the lies even more. Tweets from Republicans have collectively received billions more views than those of Democrats. And some X users are even being paid “thousands” to share election disinformation or register to vote (if their views align with Musk’s).
Many other billionaires are overtly or indirectly aiding Trump.
The good news is that media figures and other influencers are increasingly noting the influence of billionaires on elections. But big media and its tech allies are themselves a critical part of the strategy for this breed of billionaire.
We are at the point where, thanks to tech billionaires, even their search engines and AI refer to January 6 as a “riot” rather than what it factually was, a deadly armed insurrection. It is important to understand that artificial intelligence is not the agent of unbiased fact that it is often presented as, but controlled by the sort of consensus fallacy many of these figures benefit from.
These men — and they are nearly all men — are our true rulers. They are autocrats who exist in the center of an authoritarian/totalitarian venn diagram.
These are the people who traffic in and pay for the disinformation that is tearing this country apart.
Or, in Bezos’s case, bought one of America’s most important news sources, deceived the public that his wealth would protect its integrity, then blocked the Post from its past policy of endorsing presidential candidates — just as his rocketry operation was chatting with Trump and undoubtedly hoping he would give it more business.
Musk, meanwhile, states his desire to dramatically limit the US government. Imagine what the world will be like when people like him can impose their “private” solutions on all of us instead.
Of course, Harris has her billionaires too, and some billionaires do seem inclined to be — or want to be — good citizens. Yet the very existence of a comparative handful of billionaires with unfettered ability to shape every aspect of our lives is the issue we must no longer ignore.
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