Mother Jones illustration; Michael M. Santiago/Getty; Getty
It feels strange to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year was the former and future president of the United States getting shot in the face. But after Donald Trump’s victory on election night, the image that was seared in my mind was that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat perched awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X.
Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual field campaign in key swing states. And he had hosted a glitchy conversation with Trump on X. But the appearance at that rally of a defense contractor who controls more than half the satellites in the night sky, one of the nation’s largest electric vehicle charging networks, and quite possibly the social media app where you found (or will share) this article, felt like something ominous and new.
Tim Walz—who told a crowd a few weeks after Musk’s appearance in Butler that the tech mogul was “skipping around like a dipshit”—was only trying to get one over on his counterpart when he called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” But it was not entirely wrong. It was Musk who lobbied Trump to put JD Vance on the ticket. Musk was the one funding the get-out-the-vote effort. Musk was the guy who turned one of the world’s biggest social media platforms into a black hole of anti-immigrant agitprop. Musk was the guy who was going to be given the keys to the federal budget to find $2 trillion in cuts from just $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. At a Vance rally in Scottsdale, Arizona, the weekend before the election, Musk was the name people kept bringing up on their own. He was “hilarious,” a voter told me. He was a “genius.” (He was also “not a very good speaker.”) Musk’s organizers swarmed the line outside to collect data for his PAC so that he could—well, it’s not really clear what the point of that was.
From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it.
It is hard to say anything new about the 78-year-old Trump. Nine years after his first campaign event in Manhattan, the ex-president seemed to be running out of steam sometimes, forgetting names and places and eschewing his entire stump speech to dance—if that’s the word—to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” But Musk did offer something different, not in any of the things he had to say—the inevitable race science and disinformation and faux-heterodox drivel of someone discovering conservative message boards for the first time while also playing StarCraft—but rather in the relationship between money and power he represented. This was the oligarch election. And Musk was the richest and most powerful oligarch of them all.
One of the simpler explanations you often heard about Trump’s rise was that the electorate had been primed for someone like him. The conditions were all there for the right kind of demagogue—we had bad trade deals, scam culture, reality television, and the Electoral College. You could say the same about Musk and the billionaires whose spending set the terms for how the election would be conducted and what it would be about.
In Musk’s case, the work was made possible by landmark Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, which opened the floodgates to an ever-growing and frankly horrifying gusher of often untraceable cash into the political system. The rules on what those outside groups can and cannot do, and how closely they can coordinate, have become a little more toothless every cycle since. For one person to gain this much influence, a lot of other kinds of people and institutions have to lose it. Musk’s power has been enabled by the monopolistic growth of the internet economy, and the not entirely unrelated collapse of much of the hard-news media industry, online and off, and by a tax and regulatory climate that has allowed a small subset of people in Silicon Valley to grow not just rich, but nation-state rich.
The oligarch election was not just about Musk. Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge to Joe Biden was partly funded by billionaire investor Bill Ackman. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s primary challenge to Trump was supposed to be bankrolled by Larry Ellison, but the money never materialized. And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign was an almost wholly owned subsidiary of Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew. Mellon, who was, at one point, the largest contributor to both the RFK Jr. and Trump campaigns, was sort of Musk inverted—a scion of Gilded Age wealth who spent part of his family fortune on a fruitless search to find Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the sea. Kennedy chose his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, because, as Sergey Brin’s ex-wife, she had enough money to fund the campaign. There was a Musk angle there, too: Shanahan once allegedly had an affair with the X-man (which they have both denied); according to the New York Times, Musk once offered her his sperm, as part of his obsession with populating the world with his heirs.
In October, Jeff Bezos unilaterally stopped his newspaper from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. It was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term.
Musk’s former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel, did not open up his wallet for Trump this time. But he didn’t need to. His contribution to the campaign was merely a vice president—his former employee Vance, who has credited the billionaire with changing his life. Vance got to the Senate because Thiel personally introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and spent $15 million to get him elected. He’s becoming vice president, in part, because Thiel, like Musk, reportedly urged Trump personally to pick him.
These donors often set the terms of the debate. Trump said so explicitly at a fundraiser early in the campaign, promising fossil fuel executives a host of goodies—including eliminating the electric-vehicle mandate—if they ponied up $1 billion to support his bid. He supported a ban on TikTok in the United States, then changed his mind after a meeting with the Pennsylvania billionaire—and TikTok investor—Jeff Yass, who has given Republican outside groups and candidates nearly $50 million. Incidentally, Yass was a shareholder in a company that merged with Trump’s media venture in 2024.
The money sloshing around, in pursuit of tax cuts and government contracts and something called “pronatalism,” has real consequences for real people. If there was a defining issue on the Republican side, it was the continuing attack on transgender athletes who compete—in astonishingly small numbers—in high school and college sports. It is impossible to overstate how much this issue dominated the airwaves of competitive Senate races.
Who was funding this onslaught? A peek at the disclosures of the Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican outside group, offered a revealing look. Leading the way was billionaire Ken Griffin, a hedge funder who once said that ultrawealthy elites have “insufficient influence” in American politics.
His $27.5 million was followed by $25 million from another investor, Paul Singer, who, in 2023, appeared in the news for flying Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet, and $15 million from Miriam Adelson (a rounding error, compared with the $100 million she pumped into her super-PAC, Preserve America). Musk gave $10 million. Another top contributor was Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million), the private equity kingpin who once compared President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the carried interest loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The investment shop co-founded by Silicon Valley mogul Marc Andreessen chipped in $1.5 million—perhaps enough to buy a starter home someday in the new model city he’s trying to build from scratch in California. Throw in a few million from a couple of Waltons, and a big check from Rupert Murdoch, and the Senate Leadership Fund was flush.
The election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out.
This oligarch capture is asymmetrical. There’s no real equivalent on the left to the alliance between Trump and Musk—of a single donor taking over a campaign, weaseling his way into the government, and sitting in on a call with the president of Ukraine. But Democratic campaigns also were shaped by the power of ultrawealthy donors. Conservatives talked incessantly about George Soros not just because of the subtext, but because of the plain text—he gave $60 million to a super-PAC that supports Democrats in 2024. (Musk’s get-out-the-vote program was taking advantage of a loophole that a Soros-backed group had asked the FEC to approve.) Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $50 million. So did Bill Gates, whose influence over public health and education has made him a bogeyman for a different set. The new right-wing “populists” might be full of shit. But their punches often land for a reason.
In the three-week interregnum between Biden’s disastrous debate and his departure from the presidential race, some of the most important voices were the megadonors—the shadow party within the party. And in the weeks that followed, as Kamala Harris set out to define what her candidacy would be about, everyone from Mark Cuban to Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman came forward with the same suggestion—that perhaps Harris could replace Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has been the tip of the spear of the current administration’s antitrust enforcement. When the people funding the campaign are naming the bureaucrats they want fired, that’s oligarchy, too.
But the election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated, but by those who sat it out.
When I mentioned Musk’s donations to a voter at the Vance rally, she was nonplussed.
“Look at what Zuckerberg is doing on the left with his money,” she said.
But seriously, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with his money these days: not very much! A former supporter of immigration reform efforts who helped pay for poll workers across the country a few years ago, Zuckerberg has largely given up on political activism, the New York Times reported. He made peace with Trump, who has threatened him with “life in prison.” After Trump was shot, Zuckerberg called the former president a “badass.” They even spoke by phone.
In seemingly abandoning any efforts to maintain a functioning online space, and actively throttling real political news, Zuckerberg created a vacuum that other powerful actors could fill. Meta no longer really cares about politics or moderation. The company took huge amounts of money from Musk for misleading advertisements that pretended to be coming from Harris.
It fit a pattern of elite timidity. The Times reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—like a number of other prominent business titans—quietly supported Harris, but was afraid to say so publicly. And in October, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, stopped his newspaper, the Washington Post, from publishing an editorial endorsing Harris, on the grounds that he believed newspaper endorsements contributed to a declining trust in news media. It was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a second Trump term.
And sure enough, within hours of Trump’s victory, Bezos issued a rare public statement, congratulating the president-elect “on an extraordinary political comeback.” Zuckerberg chimed in on his Threads app to applaud Trump’s “decisive” win and say he “looked forward to working” with his administration. The billionaires aren’t going to save us. They might not even try.
