As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy.
There’s no denying that billionaires are trying to bend society to their will. America’s 800-plus billionaires hold over $6 trillion in wealth, more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households. The super wealthy own a greater share of the nation’s wealth today than they did during the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And they will do whatever they have to do to keep things that way.
Timothy Mellon, the billionaire heir to a Gilded Age fortune, has given an astounding amount—$125 million—to a pro-Trump super PAC. That’s more than the combined donations of 3 million typical Americans giving $40 each. Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, has contributed $100 million to, among other things, help finance a flood of pro-Trump ad buys in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. (Trump has reportedly pressed her to cough up $250 million on his behalf.) Rupert Murdoch, a billionaire immigrant from Australia, has helped Trump day after day by turning Fox News into a truth-bending, immigrant-bashing, pro-Trump propaganda machine.
Dick Uihlein, an Illinois billionaire who runs a cardboard and paper-goods empire, gave $49 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he runs. Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and his wife contributed $25 million to another pro-Trump super PAC, Right for America. Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, and his wife have given $70 million to conservative causes this election cycle, including $25 million to the Club for Growth, a free-market group that is backing Trump. (Trump reversed his position on banning TikTok earlier this year, not long after he held a meeting with Yass.)
Billionaires are also flexing their muscle in Senate and House races. For instance, Brian Armstrong and his company, CoinBase, the largest crypto exchange, have helped lead their industry’s $40 million effort to defeat Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio and crypto critic who is running for reelection.
As for the $250 billion man, Elon Musk has invested at least $75 million in a super PAC that he created to run much of Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation. He has also used his $44 billion investment in Twitter to turn it into a Trump fanboy site that promotes disinformation and conspiracy theories to help move as many people as possible to the right and into Trump’s camp. Musk evidently hopes that a Trump victory will help SpaceX and other companies he’s involved in continue to win billions of dollars in federal contracts while also helping get federal agencies to stop bringing so many actions that accuse Musk’s companies of breaking the law.
Without the enormous aid from these and other billionaires, Trump’s race against Kamala Harris wouldn’t even be close—he’d be well behind. These plutocrats’ efforts underline the wisdom of something that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Crystallizing Brandeis’ fears, the billionaires backing Trump don’t seem terribly concerned about preserving our democracy. They support Trump despite his talk of being a dictator on Day One, terminating the Constitution and siccing federal prosecutors on his political opponents and critics. They’re far more concerned about slashing taxes and regulations than about the risks of electing a demagogue who hails Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, as a model.
Indeed, Trump is champing at the bit to again enact huge tax breaks for the richest 1 percent and corporations. He is so eager to attract billionaires’ donations that he has tirelessly wooed Musk, even promising to make him the nation’s “government efficiency” czar. It’s frightening that Trump would consider appointing a gazillionaire who doesn’t begin to understand the important role that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs play for millions of Americans to decide which government programs to chop and whether to fire thousands of federal employees who provide important services.
Although Harris also has some influential billionaire backers—Bill Gates says he has donated $50 million to help her—she is uncomfortable with America’s extreme income inequality and the super wealthy’s immense economic and political might. Unlike Trump, Harris wants to impose higher taxes on the super rich, including a “billionaire minimum tax,” and perhaps even a tax on their unrealized investment gains.
Many Americans fail to realize just how much the super rich use their financial muscle to twist and tilt policymaking to their liking. After the painful 2008 recession, the super rich got Washington’s policymakers to focus on cutting the budget deficit instead of cutting the painfully high unemployment rate and assuring a speedy recovery. The ultrawealthy successfully lobbied to stop Presidents Obama and Biden from repealing the “carried interest” loophole that saves private equity executives billions by taxing their profits at lower capital gains rates, around 20 percent, instead of higher personal income tax rates, around 37 percent. Billionaires’ successes in helping elect right-wing lawmakers and in lobbying help explain why Congress keeps blocking progressive ideas that have overwhelming public support, like a higher minimum wage and paid family and medical leave. (In one of the most insidious and destructive moves by billionaires, the Koch brothers used their wealth to essentially create the climate denial movement, as Jane Mayer explains in her book Dark Money, funding pseudoscientists to produce “studies” that supposedly debunked human-caused global warming and donating heavily to right-wing think tanks and politicians to get them to deny global warming and fight efforts to curb fossil fuels.)
All these donations and machinations by the ultrarich make clear that billionaires are a danger to our democracy, our environment, and efforts to create a fairer economy. We desperately need to rein in their power, but that will be far harder than it should be because the Supreme Court has repeatedly shot down rules that seek to limit the ultrawealthy’s influence in politics. But we can at least tax billionaires more. Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at UC—Berkeley, has called for a 2 percent annual tax on billionaires’ wealth. That would yield over $100 billion a year—money that could finance universal pre-K nationwide or build hundreds of thousands of desperately needed affordable housing units. Billionaires will no doubt whine that such a tax is unfair and extortionate; it could reduce some billionaires’ wealth, for example, from $10 billion all the way down to $9.8 billion one year and around $9.6 billion the next. Poor souls.
This would be just the first step in reforming our country so that billionaires can’t buy elections. We need far more public financing of elections across the U.S. to help counter the massive political power of the super rich and the scourge of Citizens United. We need far more Supreme Court justices like Louis Brandeis, who will stand up to the super wealthy and not bow down to them. Last, we need to defeat Donald Trump. Notwithstanding his promises about helping forgotten Americans, it is crystal clear that if Trump wins in November, he will cater to the ultrawealthy, as he did in his first term, and do what they want on tax cuts, regulations, and much more. And what they want is often profoundly at odds with what’s best for building a healthy society.
