House Speaker MIke Johnson’s photo of himself, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.
Mike Johnson, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ , via Wikimedia Commons

American billionaire Elon Musk has far more money than could be spent in one or even one thousand lifetimes of extreme opulence. This amount of wealth is difficult to even conceive of; but when we quantify it, we can see just how much he can get out of just owning things. According to Forbes, Elon Musk has a net worth of around four hundred billion dollars, more money than the entire GDP of his native South Africa. Like a dragon sitting on a horde of gold, Musk has arisen from his slumber, and we are now feeling the impact of the mobilisation of his immense fortune. The secret here is that through relatively modest investments, Elon and others can exponentially increase their wealth through taking hold of the means of information distribution, political expression, and government policy. 

Though a train wreck for the company, Elon’s acquisition of Twitter cannot be seen as anything but profitable for him personally. For only $43 billion, Elon bought a controlling share in the political zeitgeist. Twitter/X has a very special position among social media sites. While not the most used, with a monthly user base one-sixth that of Meta’s flagship Facebook, it is where people go to talk politics as the ‘digital town square’. Donald Trump cut out mainstream news back in 2016 with his use of the platform, and throughout his first administration his account acted as a direct public look at the policy of the American government. Already influential, Trump’s use of Twitter meant it increasingly became the place where politicians and analysts would go to gauge public opinion. In this way, using the algorithm to push your own agenda, and using your newly bought platform to start political panics from the comfort of your home, means what one unelected man thinks is now immediately newsworthy. While Musk has made a lot of his commitment to ‘free speech’ on Twitter, in a social media landscape increasingly consolidated under a handful of individuals, money can buy you influence. While speech may somewhat be free, an audience is not. 

Far cheaper than Twitter, Musk poured a quarter-billion dollars into the Trump Campaign, a significant percentage of the overall funds raised by the presidential campaign, and enough to both seriously affect the result and gain favour from the new regime. Moreover, he has threatened to fund handsomely anyone who runs against his ideological enemies in the Republican party, consolidating political control over one of the most powerful political organisations in the world. Musk might think himself to be acting for the good of America, but even if that is true, he will also end up making an enormous profit. 

Mr Musk’s primary consumer is not Americans, but rather the American state. SpaceX regularly wins federal contracts, while Tesla has gained enormous amounts of funding through subsidies. Musk spent less than a quarter of a quarter of one percent of his net worth to help Trump get elected, yet it was still enough to make a significant difference in the course of the campaign. The money he spent on can now be gained back a thousandfold through government contracts, the rising prices of his stocks, and now significant influence over the federal budget. What is free speech or the power of any ordinary person against an individual with personal access to resources of a globally hegemonic power? 

This is not an exclusively American issue. Remember Musk’s threat to flood Britain’s Reform UK party with a £100 million campaign domination, over double the total spending at the last election. For British democracy this is an unimaginable amount; for Musk, it’s a rounding error. On this specific occasion, the proposal stalled due to a combination of UK Law and a falling out over Tommy Robinson; but that is not to say his influence overseas is insignificant. Financial, personal, and algorithmic support has been given to far right parties across Europe, such as the German AfD. With the rise of these parties, all suspiciously sympathetic to the economic interests of Musk and other oligarchs, can we truly say this is all down to the eloquence of their arguments? 

With more and more economic, and by extension political, power concentrated in just a few select hands, there is clearly a fundamental flaw in our liberal democracies.  We have a globalised economy and globalised capital, but not yet globalised regulatory systems to constrain them; in other words, our current institutions are woefully unprepared to secure democracy. Here I would argue Biden in his farewell address is being far too optimistic by saying that an oligarchy is forming. In reality, it has already formed, and holds more influence over American and even world politics than any other. Wielding this power in pursuit of their own interests, most concerningly through the award of public contracts to their own firms, we are quickly approaching a plutocracy. The richest get richer not only through the operation of unrestrained markets, but through active government support. Here we see, in the Trump administration, a billionaire’s government. Oligarchs are out of the shadows and blatantly looking you in the face. We all need to ask whether we want to live in a society like this, where just a handful of people can have such an outsized influence in our political systems, and if we think the accumulation of such unimaginable wealth should be able to be possible under one individual. Musk may be the biggest of these threats, but he is not alone, and the systems that created him are not unique to him.