The upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump will feature three of the world's richest individuals, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, raising concerns about the growing influence of tech billionaires in American government.
President Joe Biden's pointed warning that the United States is becoming an 'oligarchy' of tech moguls will be starkly evident at Donald Trump 's inauguration, when the three richest men in the world will be seated on the dais as Trump takes the oath for a second term. Elon Musk , the world's richest person, assumed an unprecedented level of prominence in the final stretch of Trump's campaign, spending an estimated $200 million through a fundraising committee.
Musk has a new role in restructuring the government in the incoming cabinet and will be joined on the dais by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. The companies of both men have enormous contracts with the federal government. Completing the trio is the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, who recently shifted his company's priorities to align with Trump's and has grown closer to the president-elect less than six months after Trump threatened to jail him. The three men are worth almost a trillion dollars combined and will be joined at the inauguration by the CEOs of OpenAI and the social media platform TikTok, whose shutdown in the United States is scheduled for the weekend under a new law that Trump opposes. Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Tech billionaires have long had a prominent role in national politics, and several multimillionaires helped finance the campaign of Trump's Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, a multimillionaire donor in favor of progressive causes. But the deployment of the inauguration highlights the unusually direct role that multimillionaires have in the incoming government. Biden's use of the word 'oligarchy' was not accidental: it is a direct reference to the form of government in Russia, whose leader Trump has long praised. Russian President Vladimir Putin preserves the riches of the super-rich and keeps them under control with threats.A look at the dynamics of the incoming government and the megabucks: Inequality in the United States has been declining for most of Biden's term and is slightly lower than it was a decade ago, but it remains quite high historically. It is worth noting that the top 0.1% of Americans — about 131,000 households — owned nearly 14% of the country's wealth last fall, or more than $22 trillion in stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. This figure is higher than the 10% of two decades ago. The bottom half of the US population, or about 65 million households, collectively owns only 2.4% of the nation's wealth, or just under $4 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. A relatively new development, however, is the stratospheric level of wealth of a handful of the several hundred billionaires in the country. Musk, for example, is worth $450 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos, with $242 billion, and Zuckerberg, with $212 billion, have also reached new heights. They are the only people worth more than $200 billion in the world. All but two of the 10 richest people in the world are tech magnates. The explosion in wealth levels has led Democrats to try to reform the US tax code to focus on wealth. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax during her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Democrats in 10 states last year unsuccessfully attempted to create wealth taxes. Several Democrat-leaning states impose higher taxes on those who earn more than $1 million as a way to address income inequality. Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance —who worked as a venture capitalist with conservative Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel— and others in his inner circle identify as 'people's men,' and promise to wrest power from interest groups and elites and return it to Americans. Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a prominent conservative, has repeatedly called the United States government an 'oligarchy' that rejects the will of citizens for its own military and financial interests. Trump, of course, is himself a billionaire. And part of his appeal has always been a form of populism centered on billionaires
Wealth Inequality Tech Oligarchs Donald Trump Inauguration Elon Musk Jeff Bezos Mark Zuckerberg Political Influence
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