The Rise of the Tech Oligarchs Part I: How we got here

Musk, Zuckerberg, and all the rest.

We need to talk about Elon Musk and the rise of the tech oligarchs.

For over 15 years, money and power have been bleeding from citizens and elected governments, to the founders of a small number of digital services that dominate our online lives. That’s given them unprecedented power to reshape society’s rules in increasingly extreme ways. Not only do they have vast financial resources for directly funding their pet causes; they can tilt the scales of their platforms to benefit beliefs they support, and suppress speech they don’t.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about how we got here, and what we need to do about it. How did the tech oligarchs get their unprecedented power? Is Elon Musk uniquely problematic, or the leading edge of a system-wide problem? And what can we as citizens do about this power to reclaim our democracy?

Tech oligarchs are not normal business leaders. Their direct personal control over enormous resources more closely resembles the robber barons of the 19th century than the large industry leaders of the 20th century. But crucially, tech oligarchs have a power unprecedented in human history; platform-derived power to directly surveil, promote, and suppress the conversations of millions of people, simultaneously.

At first, that power was used primarily to defend their business interests from specific government policies. One could argue that was somewhat normal politics––after all, everyone in our society has the right to express their views and advocate for their interests. The job of our elected leaders in the face of this kind of predictable resistance was to propose well-designed policies in the public interest that would win broad support despite this resistance.

Today, however, therelationship between tech oligarchs and governments is building in a far darker direction. Rather than simply opposing government policies that impact their businesses, Elon Musk and his tech oligarch brethren are fully recognizing the power technology has handed to them, and leveraging that power to attempt to reorder society to suit their interests. It is no longer about resisting unwise or anti-innovation tech policy; it is about reordering how government works to serve their interests and function like their businesses, not as socially accountable institutions.

For democracy to survive in this new age, we need to disrupt this new order. We must decouple the financial power of platforms from power over our conversations and attention, by removing their ability to control our feeds. We need to break up the monopolistic systems tech oligarchs produce to insulate their power from competition from better alternatives, making it easy to leave platforms we no longer like. And we need to firewall any role of power in our government from being taken over by unelected oligarchs like Musk, passing new laws that require those who want to transform public systems to get elected like anyone else.

Where did the tech oligarchs’ power come from?

First, credit where it is due. Some tech oligarchs started by building a genuinely quality innovative product; the proverbial better mousetrap. Some started a network in the right place, at the right time, launching a new service at the exact moment people and bandwidth were ready for it. But those who truly innovated and those who were merely lucky have all benefited massively from the network effect; the fact that once a communication service gets sufficiently ahead of others, it develops runaway momentum regardless of its merits. The network effect means that the more people use a service, the more valuable it becomes for each user; and people feel increasingly pressured to join and stay on the service. Think of not having a telephone––or in our era, not having a cellphone. For the vast majority of us, these are not truly voluntary technologies; the costs of not participating are intolerably high. Although no tech oligarch platform is quite this indispensable, particular social networks function similarly for particular demographics, like TikTok or SnapChat for Gen Z, or Linkedin for white collar professionals.

As each individual tech oligarch’s network power has grown, they’ve discovered an age-old service giant dilemma: innovation and quality service are valuable, but hard to build and sustain. Much easier is buying up would-be competitors instead of innovating––squelching new mouse traps, instead of finding ways of serving consumers better. And recognizing that the network effect alone might not always be enough to keep their users, tech oligarchs have gone further by building “walled gardens” to trap users, building steadily higher barriers to them leaving, no matter how fed up they may be with oligarchs’ management of their system.

The oligarch’s tool of trade: placing walls around your Internet

The greatness of the Internet was built on open standards that anyone could use and that no one owned, that enabled us to communicate to anyone, at any time, anywhere. Protocols like https, ftp, and email made the Internet the most open space for innovation and communication humanity had ever seen. But having built their empires on the back of the open Internet’s success, tech oligarchs have done their best to impoverish that bounty, breaking it into ever smaller “walled gardens” ––spaces where you can easily communicate with your friends and family ONLY if you stay on their platform, and where they’re handling of your data and your contacts is tuned to punish you for trying to leave.

Once these platforms are confident that you can’t leave, they start making their service worse for you, and better for them. Author Corey Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe this phenomenon, and enough of us are experiencing it was named 2024’s word of the year.

Here’s how it works: first, platforms attract users with a good or innovative service. Then they attract sellers and advertisers who want to reach their rapidly growing user base. Then they steadily worsen the quality, features and control their users have over their service, squeezing the actual usefulness of the service out of existence for users who are dismayed to find we can’t leave, because everyone we know is on the service and expects us to be, too. Then they squeeze advertisers and sellers too, raising service charges and decreasing transparency over their business partners because again- where else are they going to turn to?

Social media services are the obvious example of enshittification at work, but the dynamic occurs everywhere in the tech oligarch controlled Internet; think of Amazon allowing fake books and AI slop to flood their platform, and using their vast surveillance network of vendors to copy and undercut their products. Any time a tech giant is allowed to build a walled garden around a network effect, they develop immense power they don’t deserve, and throw that power around to make things worse for everyone else.

Elon Musk is a late convert to social media ownership, but he’s quickly grasped and acted on the tech oligarch gameplan. Since buying Twitter he’s banned linking to other social media platforms, blocked researchers from studying what’s happening on X, and is even suing advertisers who decided to stop buying advertising on the platform. Despite claims he’d prioritize reducing bots, X has more bots than ever, alongside worsening glitches and tech problems. His real goal is the same as every tech oligopolist: taking advantage of Twitter’s captive audience, not building a better social media service.

When tech giant algorithms encouraged us to spend our time on the empty calories of unhealthy social comparisons and conspiracy rabbit holes, they were creating serious social problems. But some tech giants are realizing they can use that power to take our attention to anything they want it to– including promoting their personal power and politics.

What’s new and dangerous about the tech oligarchs in 2025?

America’s tech oligarchs are no longer merely resisting government regulation of their businesses. Instead of resisting formal regulation, they are seeking to trade informalfavours with politicians to control the actions of America’s government.

Elon Musk is the prime offender. The world’s richest man bought himself the world’s largest bullhorn in purchasing X, and repeatedly forced his employees to artificially boost the popularity of his tweets. He’s used that pulpit to promote a range of dangerous and embarrassing falsehoods, discredited conspiracy theories, and forced AI on its users that uses tweets to determine truth.

Musk purchased an unelected, unprecedented leading position with President Trump’s administration by pouring over $290 million of uncapped election spending into his election, and has since unleashed staff from his companies as vandals within the institutions of American governance, including the Treasury department, Education department, USAID, and more. Musk claims the agents of DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) are dedicated to reducing government waste and corruption. Few serious observers believe him, viewing it as a power grab with few connections to democratic governing bodies. 

It is critical to understand, though, that Elon Musk is not a lone problem; he is a public face of a newly muscular Silicon Valley that is contemptuous of democracy and not afraid to show it. Mark Zuckerberg has rushed to adopt performative rather than principles-based content moderation practices to win favour with the new Trump government. Zuckerberg’s gambit is an open quid pro quo effort with the new government; his social media platforms will govern in ways the government likes, and the government will do things he is demanding, such as dismantling the Consumer Finance Protection Board that was set up after 2008 to protect us from financial crimes, and attempting to force Canada, the UK and the EU to drop any regulation of his companies. 

Make no mistake: an alliance of the world’s tech oligarchs and the world’s most powerful government is a five alarm fire for every Internet user that wants to see democracy represent the will of the public, not the whims of the oligarchs. 

Left-leaning folk who worry about corporate power and right-leaning folk concerned by government overreach should both see this moment for what it is; an informal alliance of both their enemies, and a life-threatening danger to liberal democracies. The end product is a society where old laws are not struck or replaced, but are simply no longer so important; where the laws on the books apply to us one way, and not at all for the oligarchs.

Haven’t rich people always controlled American politics?

Not like this. Of course rich and powerful people have always had disproportionate influence in society. The left has George Soros and Warren Buffett; the right has the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel. Campaign finance reform has been and remains urgently important to reduce the policy influence of rich billionaires compared to the rest of us.

But none of these people have previously personally attended America’s sensitive meetings with foreign states, or used their social network to terrorize low level level government staff they dislike, while claiming identifying their own staff is a violation of the law. None have personally selected government staff who will decide whether to approve tens of billions of dollars of their businesses’ contracts.

Businesses donated $62 million to President Biden’s 2021 inauguration; they donated almost triple, or $150 million, to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Tech oligarch owned companies were front and centre, with Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Uber, and OpenAI donating $1 million each, and cryptocurrency company Ripple an eye-watering $5 million. The new administration has signalled it can and will be bought, and tech oligarchs are paying to secure their interests.

Corrupt mixing of government and tech giant interests is happening in front of our eyes. For democracy to survive, we have to stop it.

In our next post, we’ll talk more about what exactly defines an oligarch; give as complete as possible an account of what Elon Musk is doing, and why it makes him one; and consider the evidence for whether DOGE has any legitimate purpose. Stay tuned.