Wealth Gives to Power
Elon Musk spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump!
Musk is not the only millionaire+ to donate to Trump, but he is by far the largest. Wired reported on the many extremely wealthy people donating to the Trump campaign represented by these red circles:
Power Creates Wealth
Even before his inauguration, Musk's investment in the Trump campaign paid off. Elon Musk has made $4 billion per day since Trump won the election. Musk's net worth has exploded to $400 billion as Tesla's market cap added nearly half a trillion dollars.Perhaps reading the room, or more accurately, Musk's checkbook, other wealthy titans of the tech industry realize that money is necessary to play ball in the Trump administration.
Common Cause explains that big tech donated millions of dollars to the Trump inauguration - and, that this is NOT normal;
This is not normal, but the voters chose to deviate from normal, so why does it matter?
As Campaign Legal Center puts it;
...private donations collected through Trump’s inaugural committee can be leveraged to bankroll a multi-day extravaganza of lavish dinners, galas and events that give big money donors exclusive face time with the incoming administration.
The exorbitant price of inaugurations — and the fact that inaugural committees can accept unlimited contributions as well as corporate money — make them an ideal way for wealthy special interests to buy political access and influence, ultimately drowning out the voices of everyday Americans.
Even worse, while some corporations and their top executives have publicly exchanged big money for access to the new administration, others who want to avoid public scrutiny can easily exploit pathways that keep their spending secret.
That would mean the public doesn’t even know who is spending big to get their thoughts in the new president’s ear — a recipe for potential corruption.
Robert Reich (Jan 26, 2025); Trump's First Week, The Real Story explains succinctly what is happening,
Trump is leading a move to replace democracy with oligarchy. He’s implementing a plan to make the wealthiest people in America far wealthier and more powerful, including Trump himself, and to turn American democracy into a giant corporation run by a handful of absurdly rich men.
He thinks he can accomplish this by getting the rest of us so angry at one another — over immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, diversity, and the like — that we don’t look upward and see where most of the wealth and power have gone.
Brooke Harrington and The Broligarchy
Brooke Harrington is a sociologist (currently at Dartmouth) who has studied the ultra-wealthy and how they use their wealth to create power. She was featured on the Daily Show yesterday, Jan 2025 (embedded below). Harrington explains that this interconnection of wealth and the politics of the Trump administration is even farther awry than how the oligarchy has acted in Russia. In Russia, the oligarchs funded Putin to assuage him to look the other way while they make their millions. But in the US it appears that our "broligarchy" is seeking an active role in the government policy. This is especially true for Musk who has secured a role as "DOGE" in the government giving him power and control without the oversight or approval of Congress.
Elon Musk
As historian Heather Cox Richardson explains (2/2/2025),
Billionaire Elon Musk’s team yesterday took control of the Treasury’s payment system, thus essentially gaining access to the checkbook with which the United States handles about $6 trillion annually and to all the financial information of Americans and American businesses with it. Apparently, it did not stop there....After Musk’s team breached the USAID computers, cybersecurity specialist Matthew Garrett posted: “Random computers being plugged into federal networks is obviously terrifying in terms of what data they're deliberately accessing, but it's also terrifying because it implies controls are being disabled—unmanaged systems should never have access to this data.Musk is unelected, and it appears that DOGE has no legal authority. As political scientist Seth Masket put it in tusk: “Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title...Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.”
Why Has Musk Gained Access to Our Data (2/2/2025) by Olga Lautman
I don’t want to be an alarmist and was not planning on writing anything tonight, but this is insanely dangerous. Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire with no oversight, has gained access to the federal government’s payment system. Even worse, this is happening through the unofficial, unauthorized, fake DOGE, and a group of Musk’s handpicked associates. How did these people even get security clearances? DOGE is not a real government agency, yet it has been given the power to monitor and potentially block federal payments, including Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements, federal employee salaries, and tax refunds.
Even more concerning, the federal payment system contains sensitive personal information about all of us—millions of Americans who receive these payments. Why does Musk have access to our sensitive information? And, what is he planning to do with it?
A top Treasury official, David A. Lebryk, retired yesterday after clashing with surrogates of Elon Musk over access to the U.S. government’s sensitive payment systems. His departure followed an administrative leave amid pressures to allow Musk to gain control over America’s “checkbook,” which handles $6 trillion in payments. Then, last night, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system.
From The NY Times (2/3/2025), Inside Musk's Aggressive Incursion into the Federal Government,
Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences. Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections....There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.
The historian Douglas Brinkley described Mr. Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”
writes in A New Kind of Coup, an essay on Lucid:
Musk’s Autocratic Capture
Musk already had dangerous amounts of power in America due to his defense and other government contracts that make our national security partly dependent on his products. His takeover of Twitter, a platform widely used by governments and politicians around the world, gave him even more leverage. What he lacked was the key to the castle, a way to get control of government from within. The $250 million he spent to help Trump get elected helped to unlock the door. And so DOGE was created as a vehicle for his infiltration.
The press reported on Musk’s unusual and constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, and the input he had on the presidential transition process, but did not highlight the likely aim behind it: to insert his private businesses into the governance equation. Employees from SpaceX and other Musk entities interviewed potential appointees for the Trump administration.
Now Musk and his surrogates have physically occupied the Office of Personnel Management, setting up beds to have a 24/7 presence. They have also infiltrated the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings. Thomas Shedd, a former software engineer at Tesla, is now director of Technology Transformation Services within the GSA.
That means that random individuals, whose credentials seem to lie mainly in their loyalty to Musk, now have enormous power over America’s purse strings and access to a treasure trove of sensitive personal data. They locked out the federal employees to prevent any obstructions to this access.
This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.
Yet Musk did not need to deploy a private army to stage his coup. He was given permission to stage this operation by Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager. Acting Deputy Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, a career civil servant, resisted when Musk allies demanded access to the payments system. Lebryk was then placed on administrative leave, at Bessent’s suggestion.
NPR reports on a deal between Musk's Tesla and the Federal Government for $400 million!
The NY Times reports (Feb 11, 2025) that since taking office, Trump has removed dozens of individuals who were in charge of oversight or ongoing litigation against Musk's interests.
Some of the specific cases include:
More from Sociologist Brooke Harrington
Harrington's latest book is Offshore (2024).
This engrossing deep dive exposes how the shadowy global system of offshore finance fuels economic crises and austerity while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. She shows what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.
Harrington also conducted an ethnography as a wealth manager for the mega-rich. She learned how they use international laws to create tax havens, and sustain wealth and power. In 2016, Harrington published this research in Capital Without Borders.
Her work was featured on an episode (5/23/2022) of the Hidden Brain Podcast, Money 2.0 The Rich and the Rest of Us
Here is an excerpt from the Guardian.
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