Wayne O'Leary

Billionaires’ Ball

Were he around today, the great 20th century journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) would have a field day puncturing the pomposities of the incoming Trump administration. The Sage of Baltimore had no use for cant, hypocrisy or abject money grubbing, and his nonpartisan rapier happily sliced and diced offending politicians regardless of political persuasion.

Here’s Mencken describing Republican President Calvin Coolidge at the height of the Roaring Twenties (From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 9, 1925):

“He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful forms. … He venerates those who have it. He believes they have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres. The things they long for, he longs to give them.”

Now, substitute the name Donald J. Trump for that of Coolidge, and you have a pretty good idea of the values this country will be governed by over the next four years.

Despite all the attention being given to Trump’s courting of the working class, it’s already clear that, beyond his own personal well-being, which is paramount, the concerns of the wealthy, particularly the billionaire class, are closest to Donald’s heart. As Mencken said of Coolidge, he thinks they’re wise and worthy of veneration. After all, he’s a billionaire himself, and so his admiration for them is a form of self-love.

Look who Trump picked for his White House transition team: billionaires Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Marc Andreessen of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Howard Lutnick of financial-services giant Cantor Fitzgerald, along with a slew of Silicon Valley tech tycoons.

The monied class loves Donald Trump almost as much as he loves them, despite the fact that they did quite well, thank you, under the Democrats. This bromance with Trump is transactional and derives in part from the implied quid pro quo that accompanied their donations to the president’s campaign.

Billionaire Andreessen, for example, delivered $4.5 million to the pro-Trump super PAC Right for America. He now reportedly expects the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech initiated by the Biden Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which affected his tech-sector investments, to be suspended; it almost certainly will.

According to a New York Times report (11/17/24), other Trumpian billionaire donors want federal regulations on artificial intelligence (“AI”) and the funny-money cryptocurrency scam eased or eliminated, more Defense Department money spent on military drones produced by “defense-tech” corporations, and the federal government’s housing-finance companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, fully privatized. The last-named gift to investors is said to be on the Trump administration’s agenda.

But what Trump’s billionaire contributors want from him above all is a commitment of no additional federal moves to tax their wealth as Democrats attempted, plus a renewal of the sunsetted and expiring (post-2025) provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. They needn’t worry on either score.

The president-elect has pledged to extend all tax features important to the billionaires, including individual top-rate reductions, the lucrative “pass-through” business deduction, and the doubled estate-tax exemption for inheritances; he also promises to further cut the corporate tax rate, previously reduced from 35% to 21%, to a plutocrat-friendly 15%.

The people who will most benefit from the anticipated tax-cut renewal, of course, don’t need it and shouldn’t get it. In 2023, close to a fifth (around 17%) of America’s gross domestic product (GDP) consisted of billionaire wealth, as measured by The Economist (5/6/23). At that time, the country had 735 billionaires, who acquired most of their riches in the U.S. tech industry, where 60% of global tech-billionaire wealth originates. America’s 20 biggest tech companies took in half of all the industry’s sales in 2017, notes The Economist, making tech our most concentrated sector.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest of the Trump billionaire donors standing with their hands out is one Elon Musk, reputed co-president and self-described “first buddy.” Elon is at once typical and atypical of his class. There’s no doubt that, by order of magnitude, he’s the most important of the bunch; he’s currently the richest man in the world, according to Forbes, worth an estimated $425 billion as of January 2025.

Those are largely untaxed assets, such as appreciating company shares or outside investments. Studies done in 2021, using IRS data, indicated billionaires like Musk paid effective taxes on their real incomes of next to nothing. In Elon’s case, his outsized donations to the Trump campaign last year (upwards of $200 million) should ensure that billionaire tax receipts won’t increase any time soon.

Regardless of Musk’s future role in the Trump administration, he’s already established himself as the symbolic face of America’ blossoming 21st-century Gilded Age. And, like the plutocrats of the original Gilded Age, whose obscene wealth was made possible through preferential treatment by a corrupted federal government (See: “American Oligarchs,” 7/1-15/22 TPP), he has not done it alone.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) reported in December that CEO Musk had received $60 million in public contracts for his companies Tesla and Space X, $42 million of it for nonunion Tesla, of which he owns 21%, to provide electric vehicles and services to the government. The Economist (11/23/24) placed his total Space X contracts at roughly $18 million (a fifth of its business), mostly with NASA and the U.S. military for satellite launches and related projects.

By any measure, Musk is what Economist editors call a crony capitalist, defined as an entrepreneur whose profits are derived from “chummy dealings with the state.” Indeed, an estimated 10% of his personal fortune is a direct result of contracts and subsidies from the U.S. government, and another 15% from his cozy relationship with the Chinese government, which has permitted him to outsource over half of his Tesla production to the People’s Republic; Musk will shortly open a second battery factory in Shanghai — nonunion, we can assume.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are a perfect duo for the Second Gilded Age: the throwback corrupt politico and the new age robber baron. Trump gets the benefit of Musk’s financial backing and a social-media platform (X, formerly Twitter) for his sleazy commentary; Musk gets an unjustified say in government and, because of the presidential relationship, inflated market valuations for his businesses.

Together, they’ll really make America “great” again.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2025

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