Not a day goes by without some news about billionaires throwing their weight around to bend the system in their favor or about politicians giving them tax cuts, government contracts or pardons. In today’s new Gilded Age, the 900-plus billionaires in the US have far too much influence over our elections, our economy, our government policies and our news media, and it’s urgent for Americans to create a movement to curb their power in order to preserve what’s left of our democracy and assure we have an economy with some basic fairness.
It’s deeply troubling that billionaires have far more power in shaping our nation’s politics and policies than do average Americans, whether they’re auto workers, teachers, nurses, carpenters or supermarket cashiers. What’s more, it’s deeply disturbing that so many billionaires support the most authoritarian president in US history, whether by donating to his campaign or his gilded ballroom.
Eleven billionaires with a combined worth of $1.35tn attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration or surrounding events. Skydance – a company controlled by David Ellison and backed by his father Larry Ellison, the world’s sixth-richest person – just clinched a $110bn deal to buy Warner Brothers, and they’ll no doubt make Warner-owned CNN far friendlier toward Trump, just as they have done with CBS News.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta plans to spend $65m on this year’s political campaigns to elect candidates who share his aversion to regulating the AI industry. Matthew Moroun, who owns the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Canada, donated $1m to a Maga group, and soon after Trump threatened to block the opening of a competing bridge that Canada paid more than $4bn to build. Crypto billionaires plan to spend millions to defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown in this year’s Senate race in Ohio, hoping for a replay of 2024, when crypto’s $40m in donations were key to unseating Brown, a critic of crypto and long the Senate’s most ardent champion of the working class.
Rupert Murdoch and other billionaire media barons have pushed the political conversation to the right. Elon Musk turned Twitter into a far-right, often-racist echo chamber after he purchased it for $44bn, while Jeff Bezos has made the Washington Post far friendlier to Trump, blocking its endorsement of Kamala Harris and moving its editorial page sharply to the right. Spearheading an anti-union push, Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Amazon have even sought to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. The labor board oversees unionization elections and cracks down on corporations’ illegal anti-union activities.
Showing how the system serves billionaires, the ultra-rich elite won lots of goodies in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of its $2tn in tax cuts, $750bn will reportedly go to the richest 1% of Americans, according to Brookings. Further helping billionaires, that law lets businesses write off the cost of private jets and significantly increases the amount the ultra-rich can give to their heirs tax-free. Trump did tech billionaires a big favor with his executive order that seeks to neuter state laws regulating AI.
After billionaires donated more than $450m to elect Trump last year, Trump named a dozen billionaires to top positions. They include education secretary Linda McMahon ($3bn in wealth), commerce secretary Howard Lutnick ($3.2bn), and Steve Witkoff ($2bn) as chief Iran/Ukraine/Gaza negotiator. Trump also asked Musk (more than $800bn) to run the wrecking-ball crew at the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”.
Trump is so busy hobnobbing with and catering to billionaires that it often seems he has forgotten the forgotten Americans he promised to fight for. Last spring, Changpeng Zhao, the world’s richest crypto executive, had Binance, the company he founded, take extraordinary steps to boost World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, catapulting its market value to over $2.1bn from $127m. Several months later, Trump pardoned Zhao ($80bn), who pleaded guilty in 2024 to breaking US money laundering laws.
I’ve long been angry about one particular example of billionaires wielding their power. The fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch played an immense role in creating the climate denial movement in the 1990s by financing research reports that denied human-caused global warming. The Koch brothers next opened their wallets to get thinktanks and politicians to trumpet those dubious reports and assert that global warming is a hoax.
“We are in the midst of an unprecedented power grab by America’s oligarchs,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, wrote recently on Substack. “This power grab is arguably the most important fact about contemporary U.S. politics.”
It’s not your imagination that inequality is growing worse – billionaires are pulling further away from everyone else, with the number of billionaires jumping by more than 50% since 2017. The richest 1%, whose wealth has more than doubled since 2017, owns 32% of the nation’s wealth, more than 10 times the 2.5% share owned by the bottom 50%. The richest 0.1% own 14.4% of the nation’s wealth, up 6 percentage points since 1990.
In the 2024 elections, the top six donors each gave more than $100m and each contributed overwhelmingly to Republicans. Together those six donated nearly $1bn. According to OpenSecrets, Musk topped the list with more than $280m, while Timothy Mellon, an 83-year-old banking heir, was second at $197m. Miriam Adelson, widow of a casino magnate, was third at $147m. Michael Bloomberg was the top donor to Democrats at $64m.
According to Citizens for Tax Fairness, 100 billionaire families gave $2.6bn to federal elections in 2024, one in every six dollars spent by candidates, parties and committees. After the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling opened the floodgates to unlimited donations, billionaires’ political spending skyrocketed, jumping 160-fold since 2010 and 2.5 times since 2020. Billionaires gave $16m in the 2008 presidential election and $231m in the 2012 election, the first after Citizens United, before soaring to $2.6bn in 2024.
Without billionaires’ contributions, most notably Musk’s $280m-plus, Trump very possibly would have lost to Kamala Harris. A New York Times analysis found that the nation’s billionaires and their families gave five times as much to Republican candidates and committees in 2024 as they did to Democrats. Billionaires accounted for 61% of the total outside spending that praised Trump and 71% of the outside money that attacked Harris.
Billionaires’ donations played a crucial role in flipping Senate seats in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in 2024, enabling Republicans to win control of the Senate. In sparsely populated Montana, 64 billionaires and their families contributed a remarkable $47m to the Republican victor, Tim Sheehy, who has co-sponsored a Senate bill to eliminate the estate tax, a prized legislative goal of the nation’s billionaires.
If you don’t realize how powerful billionaires are, then you haven’t been paying attention.
How to curb billionaires’ power
So how might we reduce billionaires’ immense clout? Many people recommend overturning Citizens United, which enabled billionaires to run amok in our political system. Overturning Citizens United will require either a wholesale makeover of the supreme court (an uphill, decades-long project) or enacting a constitutional amendment. But billionaires, I fear, can easily block such an amendment. They’d use their outsize campaign contributions to prevent two-thirds of the Senate and House and three-fourths of the states from ever approving an amendment that sends Citizens United to the garbage heap where it belongs.
Lawmakers in Montana and 11 other states are seeking to circumvent Citizens United by introducing legislation that would redefine state laws about what corporations can do and would limit their ability to make campaign donations.
Meanwhile, Congress should pass a law requiring full disclosure of all campaign donations – far too many donations remain secret. Dark money groups, non-profits and shell companies that pump money into elections without disclosing their donors spent a record $1.9bn in the 2024 elections. Passing a full-disclosure law might be difficult because many donors want to remain anonymous and many politicians want to protect them. But with everyone from Trump on down professing to favor increased transparency, passing such legislation might be possible.
But the easiest way to give average Americans more political power vis-à-vis billionaires would be to enact more public financing laws. The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-profit public policy group, says “small donor public financing that provides a multiple match on modest donations has proven especially effective” in amplifying the political voices of regular people. One model is New York City’s campaign finance law, which provides an eight-to-one match for contributions up to $250: if you donate $100 to a campaign, the city donates $800.
Support for a wealth tax is growing rapidly – it could be a highly effective tool to reduce billionaires’ economic power and perhaps their political power, too. Early this month, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, a House member from California, proposed a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires. It would raise $4.4tn over 10 years, money that could help working families by making health coverage, childcare and housing more affordable. Similarly, a powerful healthcare union in California is pushing for a state ballot initiative to enact a one-time, 5% wealth tax on billionaires.
Billionaires will howl that a wealth tax is unfair and confiscatory. But let’s get serious: will any billionaire be truly worse off if an annual wealth tax reduces their net worth from $50bn to $40bn or from $5bn to $4bn? Poor things.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economics professors at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Sanders’ proposal, saying it “would reduce the wealth of the typical billionaire in half after 15 years relative a situation with no wealth tax ... This would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and the power of billionaires.”
Lastly, we need to build a powerful movement to curb the power of billionaires, a movement that includes millions of Democrats, independents and, yes, Republicans. My dream is that such a movement would grow so powerful and unstoppable that it would push through a constitutional amendment that overturns Citizens United.
What’s giving me hope now
More and more Americans are voicing unhappiness with billionaires’ enormous power. According to the Harris Poll’s annual Americans and Billionaires Survey, conducted last November, 53% of Americans believe billionaires threaten our democracy. What’s more, 71% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, say there should be a wealth tax on top earners, and 53% (up from 46% in 2024) say there should be limits on wealth accumulation.
There’s growing dismay with the way many billionaires are kissing up to Trump, for instance, by donating to his $250m ballroom. There’s also increased anger at tech billionaires for having a public-be-damned attitude as they sprint ahead on developing AI while many Americans are alarmed that AI will destroy millions of jobs.
James Talarico, the fast-rising young Democrat running for Senate in Texas, has relentlessly attacked billionaires. “A handful of billionaires have redesigned our politics for their own profit,” he said. “They may have the money, but we have the majority.”
Bernie Sanders’ new proposal for a 5% wealth tax will shine more light on billionaires and their extraordinary power. “At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said, “this legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share of taxes so that we can create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”
During Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, many plutocrats sought to destroy the New Deal and programs like Social Security. FDR declared war against “organized money”, and he succeeded in shrinking the power of big money through progressive taxation and mass unionization.
Paul Krugman was absolutely right when he wrote: “Any project to save American democracy must include a push to reduce the extreme concentration of wealth at the top.”
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
