The Changing Politics of Oligarchy

In American politics, the main beneficiaries of “dark money” have in recent years tended to be Democrats. Google representatives were reported to have visited the White House at least 427 times during Barack Obama’s two terms. And in 2024, big spenders like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Alex Soros, James Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and various donors from Wall Street helped Kamala Harris raise over US$1.5 billion for her campaign, the highest figure in history. This may be starting to change, as a number of powerful Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have shifted their money to the populist Republican Party.

However, political shifts like these are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture. In recent decades, the influence of billionaires on both of America’s two main political parties has grown. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially ended any meaningful control over campaign spending, only accelerated this trend. In 2024, election spending, in real dollars, is estimated to have been more than twice what it was two decades ago.

Political shifts...are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture.

According to Pew Research, eighty percent of Americans now believe that wealthy donors have too much power, and they are right. Google and Apple account for nearly ninety percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google), and iOS (Apple) account for roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertising revenue, which in turn accounts for the vast majority of all ad sales. To find historic parallels for this kind of dominance, you have to go back to the Gilded Age, an era of money men and monopolists that lasted from about 1870 until the early 1900s.

The rise of very wealthy liberal tech entrepreneurs caused many commentators on the Right to worry that American politics would soon be dominated by an alliance of the Democratic Party and major tech firms such Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. That convergence of interests, they feared, would impose a radical progressive agenda on much of America and close down dissent across the internet and social media. Even the ex-wives, siblings, and children of tech oligarchs were now accruing enough money to become reliable funders of the Left’s agenda.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: screenshot of front row at 2025 Trump inauguration, via YouTube.