The Rise of the Tech Oligarchs Part II: The Anatomy of Oligarchy

What we can learn from Elon Musk.

Is Elon Musk a unique problem? Yes. And also– no.

Yes, his direct involvement in gutting large sections of America’s government without clear authority to do so is unprecedented, and deeply concerning if you value stable, effective governance by elected leaders.

But Musk is far from the only tech oligarch seeking inappropriate relationships with America’s new administration. The new oligarch playbook is not lobbying for policies they want on those policies’ merits; it is taking actions they believe will please America’s government, and expecting or demanding favours in return.

Last week, we talked about the roots of tech oligarch power; this week, we’re going deeper on what the new tech oligarchy is, with Elon Musk as our lead model.

What has Elon Musk done?

Following exactly what Elon Musk is doing can be difficult in the daily barrage of headlines and tweets. Much of the news cycle he creates around himself is sound and fury, signifying very little. But understanding the pattern of his actions and their growing harm is crucial to understanding why we need to disrupt his political power, and prevent other tech oligarchs from following his lead.

It’s not a matter of left-right politics; and not about liking or disliking Elon Musk. It’s about stopping a poorly justified, frequently illegal rampage through democratic institutions that is destroying their core capacity to meet the public’s current and future needs, whose victims are selected by a man no one voted for, carrying out a mandate never discussed during the Presidential election.

Let’s recap Musk’s actions to date. Musk first bought the leading social media platform for journalists, Twitter, in 2022; then massively artificially boosted his own voice on that platform. In the 2024 US election, he poured over $290 million of uncapped election spending into seeing Donald Trump elected America’s President, and became very close to Trump as a direct result. 

Since Trump took office, Musk has enjoyed a historically unprecedented, unelected role in reshaping America’s government. Musk’s DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) has deployed his chosen employees throughout the government’s IT infrastructure, illegally extracting vast quantities of publicly-owned information, illegally attempting to cut project funding, and forcing the resignation of nonpartisan officials who’ve attempted to stop them. Feeble attempts have been made to legitimize their activities, as with the late appointment of Musk as a “special” federal employee, and delayed announcement of a supposed DOGE head who was not even in the country. Yet courts continue to find that many of DOGE’s activities are not legal, and  staff at DOGE know it. Similarly, promises that DOGE’s access to payment systems was “read only”––meaning they could not alter, stop or redirect congressionally approved payments––have proved false.

Nominally, this is all about reducing waste and rooting out fraud; but audits of the few cost savings DOGE has announced have revealed them to be riddled with miscounting, triple counting, and taking credit for cost reductions already implemented. There are limits to actual cost savings that are possible for anyone to find : Musk has promised to cut $1 trillion in spending from the federal budget; but all discretionary non military spending by the federal government of the United States put together amounts to less than $1 trillion. 

It’s crucial to not let negative or positive feelings about Musk get in the way of understanding the core problem. Many people admire Tesla’s work pioneering the electric car, and SpaceX’s work dropping the cost of space travel. Many others have been aggravated by his trolling personal style for years, and history of sharing misinformation and falsehoods.

What matters is that democracy is a fragile thing, and democratic governance requires the rule of law. Democratic reform, wise or not, must work through passing new laws through congress and courts, not invading offices and stealing publicly owned data. A rich, and absolutely necessary, web of law ensures that public officials are monitored while acting on the public’s behalf, and carry out their duties in a transparent and accountable manner. Musk’s employees are proving they are neither bound by that law, nor willing to have their potentially illegal activities recorded and reported to the public as the law demands.

Isn’t DOGE’s mission of increasing government efficiency and detecting corruption a good thing?

Absolutely. And the government should continue pursuing those ends – using government staff who have appropriate security clearances, acting within the legal authority granted to them by Congress. Doing this job legally and with appropriate nuance is both possible and necessary.

But this is not what Musk’s agents are doing, or what many other tech oligarchs are supporting. They are feeding entire wings of government programs “into the woodchipper”, in Musk’s words, and threatening or terminating life-saving emergency food programs and children’s cancer research in the process. And they are opening gaping vulnerabilities in America’s security interests at the same time, transferring the sensitive personal information of Americans to staff previously sanctioned for black hat hacking and selling secrets, who have not received adequate security clearance, using vulnerable commercial-grade software.

“Move fast and break things” is a debatable philosophy for a tech company. It is cataclysmic for a government whose actions mean life or death for millions of American and foreign citizens. 

There is nothing in the public interest that requires them to move so quickly without appropriate authorization and safeguards. The only incentive for haste is intentionally breaking things, and getting away with things that are in Musk’s interest, not that of the public.

What does it mean to call someone an oligarch?

An oligarch combines government and corporate power in their person, but is accountable to neither. They’re not elected, and we can’t vote them out. When they get involved in government policy, they don’t pass through the approval processes or background checks that we demand of public leaders who wield public power and responsibility.

But tech oligarchs aren’t subject to normal private sector checks on their behaviour, either. Many tech oligarchs personally own majority shares of society’s largest tech and communication institutions, including Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the majority of Meta; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who own more than 80% of Google; and Elon Musk, who used his majority share buyout to take Twitter, now X, private. That means the opinions of shareholders and the market at large of their conduct and business decisions have very little impact on them.

As we discussed in part one, user-driven platforms like Facebook, Amazon and X are also enormous beneficiaries of network effects that lock in their users. With so many users, buyers and sellers, either globally or within particular social demographics, dominant platforms are quite hard to avoid using, and very punishing to leave. This dynamic further insulates tech oligarchs from any external accountability.

As oligarchy sets in, a growing share of oligarch wealth comes directly from government contracts, and indirectly from government decisions they influence that favour their businesses. Elon Musk again shows us how the model works. Musk’s rise to being the world’s wealthiest man was enabled by $38 billion of government funding, including a $465 million loan to Tesla that helped the business stay afloat when it was near failure. Since taking his unprecedented role in the Trump presidency, he’s secured government appointment of individuals personally invested in SpaceX to roles where they will decide future contracts to award to his businesses; been forced to back off a $400 million contract for government purchases of Tesla Cybertrucks; and secured an undisclosed contract for SpaceX to provide the FAA with airspace monitoring capacity. New apparent conflicts of interest are documented daily.

Once complete, oligarchy is a self-sustaining loop; oligarchs are core deciders of state policy because they’re so powerful, and they’re so powerful because of state policies.

In our lifetimes, oligarchy has been used most often to describe Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where all powerful business leaders have close ties to government. But oligarchy grows anywhere that a clear line between the appropriate role and separate power of the state and private sector is not respected and defended.

Oligarchs are a product of weakening democracies, and democracy’s final executioners. To preserve and expand their personal power, oligarchs in other failing democracies have helped make democratic decline permanent, entrenching power not in we the people and our elected representatives, but in a strongman leader and their oligarchic friends.

Elon Musk is not unique; he’s the tech oligarchy’s vanguard

Musk’s highly personal and public attack on democracy is unique; but his cozying up to the state is not. Mark Zuckerberg is right behind him, attempting an obvious and performative reversal in Meta’s content moderation policies while demanding America’s new government bully the European Union to defend his personal interests. Zuckerberg has been particularly insistent that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau set up after America’s 2008 meltdown to protect ordinary people from inappropriately risky financial instruments he’d like to sell to Meta users must be closed – and since Trump’s election, it has been.

Other tech oligarchs are following suit. In 2017, the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post adopted the motto “Democracy dies in darkness”, a slogan that goes back to paper’s history holding governments to account during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. But last year Bezos spiked the paper’s intention to endorse Kamala Harris for president in its opinion pages, and made a $1 million inauguration donation from Amazon to the new Presidency. 

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced the Washington Post opinion page would no longer cover a range of topics and values, but focus on only two issues; “free markets and personal liberties”. According to his letter announcing the change, a “broad-based opinion section” is no longer necessary because “the Internet does that job.” Concern about whether federal government institutions are functioning is presumably no longer an important priority for the largest newspaper of the nation’s capital.

Beneath the largest oligarchs are a range of shady crypto currency financiers. Crypto currency firms donated over $10 million to Trump’s inauguration ceremonies, and hosted a Cryptoball featuring “Make Bitcoin great again” hats as the administration was sworn in, convinced he would stop federal efforts to regulate their industry like any other financial instrument. 

Since taking office, the Trump family has launched the meme coins $TRUMP and $MELANIA, collecting well over $100 million in transaction fees from investors before both coins crashed. Equally important, the ownership of the majority of these depreciated coins by Trump family members is a wide-open path to future bribery by crypto-savvy power brokers. 

Any large future purchases of the currency will drive up the sell value of Trump family assets– with the purchaser able to disclose their identity privately to the family, outside of any financial disclosure or conflict of interest laws.

Taking a step back: business owners, even large ones, have the right to publicly lobby the government for policies they prefer. They do not have any right to use quid pro quos, potential bribes, and manipulation of public discussion across traditional and social media to turn the institutions of democracy into tools of their interests. And that’s the world we’re barrelling towards if we don’t disrupt tech oligarch power now.

What can we do about the tech oligarch takeover?

A lot. We’ve now gone through waves of both right and left wing concern about the power of the tech oligarchs and their ability to silence speech and tilt democracy. A growing majority of people understand their power needs to be disrupted for democracy to survive.

Next week, we’ll lay out our blueprint of how to do it: how to unwind the attention economy, break tech oligarch power in our politics, and make our online lives better, happier places in the process.

Stay tuned!