The Billionaires’ Election

The reason for Trump’s enduring advantage in earned media is best explained by Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas from the media watchdog FAIR, who observed that the business model of commercial media favors the eyeball-grabbing, fear-mongering sensationalism of Trump’s migrant-blaming demagoguery. 

The role of raw cash in our electoral system hasn’t gone away with Trump’s lower-spending victories (which, again, still involved a billion dollars); it’s an enduring feature. In 2010, when Wall Street bankers were rankled at President Barack Obama for publicly criticizing them after donating to his campaign, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn openly referred to Wall Street’s ​“buyer’s remorse.”

As with many modern U.S. elections, much of the contest came down to which rich individuals and industries backed which candidate. Trump ran an oligarch’s campaign, with billionaires in ranks pouring in lucre and using their corporate property to boost the campaign. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, known for demanding the punishment of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, ​“morphed into one of Wall Street’s loudest Trump supporters,” as the Wall Street Journal put it.

Miriam Adelson, billionaire widow of late casino baron Sheldon Adelson, singlehandedly gave an incredible $95 million to a Trump super PAC, primarily motivated by a devotion to the state of Israel.

Billionaire Wall Street financier Howard Lutnick rose to notoriety after the entire staff of his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, died on 9/11 while Lutnick was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten. He rebuilt the company by focusing on such promising areas as crypto and sports betting, but his experience with rebuilding head count led him to a major role on the Trump transition team. (A main goal has been to avoid establishment Republicans, considered to have blocked the previous administration’s wilder goals.) He also hosted a $15 million Trump fundraiser at his Hamptons mansion.

Most prominent of course has been South African mining heir Elon Musk, who poured $250 million into Trump campaign groups and extended abjectly embarrassing levels of support on his private platform Twitter (now X). Musk eagerly got a position on an external government efficiency body, joined by fellow idiotic tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. In terms of actual policy, Musk’s main goal is expected to be preserving government clean-air credits from a fossil fuel-loving administration. (About one-third of Tesla’s entire profit has come from selling clean air credits.) The roles of Musk, Lutnick, and Trump’s stable of ruling-class billionaires in directly writing cartoonishly evil austerity policies is a real escalation in plutocrat power, even if money has always leashed the American republic.

Harris, for her part, attracted fewer name brands but plenty of support from the corporate class, including an endorsement statement from dozens of CEOs (which included more than a dozen billionaires). Those who backed her, including Mark Cuban, Melinda Gates and George and Alex Soros, were allowed to steer the campaign away from election-winning populist social democracy. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has privately said he donated $50 million toward a Harris victory, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Even apart from the electoral system, rich men have long enjoyed buying media outlets, from the Gilded Age railroad baron Collis Huntington buying newspapers to ​“control or burn” them (as he put it) to Elon Musk buying Twitter (I mean X), using gigantic fortunes to shape ideas and common narratives.

Late in this election cycle, several eminent papers raised acres of hackles when they abruptly declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. Among these was the venerable Los Angeles Times, to the surprise of its editorial staff. The paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked publication of the editorial. Soon-Shiong claimed he acted because the editorial ​“would just add to the division.” The real question is why the decision is in the hands of a billionaire made rich by the profit-stacking medical industry. As Ari Paul wrote for FAIR, ​“the intervention of Soon-Shiong and his fellow moguls is an indication that our media are already not in democratic hands. Far from it; they are in the hands of the billionaire class.”

Far more prominent was what happened at the Washington Post, famously purchased by Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos for $250 million. After years of the prominent D.C. paper endorsing a White House candidate, the paper pulled its prepared Harris endorsement, a decision that came from the top. Notably, other editorials endorsing congressional candidates ran unimpeded. Within days, a third of the editorial board resigned and a stunning 250,000 readers — said to be 10% of the readership — canceled their subscriptions.

Coincidentally, employees of Blue Origin, Bezos’ private space travel company, met with Trump the same day as the announcement of the non-endorsement. Several of Blue Origin’s large interests rely on public money — including a $3.4 billion deal with NASA — and Amazon Web Services lost a $10 billion contract to run the Pentagon’s ​“war cloud” during the first Trump administration. Observers claimed the rejection was driven by the Post​’s critical coverage of Trump. In an op-ed, obliviously titled ​“The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Bezos conceded, ​“When it comes to the appearance of conflict I am not an ideal owner of the Post.” He has not since rushed to sell off this valuable megaphone, however.

Other billionaire-owned media play a more obvious role, from Musk’s cringe-fest dad jokes and stale memes on Twitter (celebrating Trump and bashing ​“wokeness”) to Australian billionaire press baron Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which remains the Eye of Sauron for the baby boomer right-wing. These outlets nakedly celebrated Trump and cursed his enemies, putting the thumb of wealth more firmly on the ideological electoral scale.

While Harris remained the clear favorite of more mainstream commercial media like CNN and the national press, the fear-based business model couldn’t help but reward Trump’s crypto-fascist spectacles with endless earned media. And even as mainstream media is near-universally considered liberal, these are still capitalist institutions, built on advertising from other giant corporations that are verboten to offend.

Further, like most corporations, today’s media companies are mostly part of larger corporate conglomerates owned by the rich — according to economist Edward Wolff of New York University, the top 1% of households by wealth owned 40% of all corporate stock in 2016, with the top 10% owning 84%. These media are possessions of the rich and make money selling ad time to other possessions of the rich — meaning any ​“liberalism” is more favorable to gay civil unions than Medicare for All. As I argue in my new book on the ruling class, Mastering the Universe, liberalism is popular for showing your billionaire broad-mindedness, but stops immediately at any social democratic policies that might tax your fortune or help your workforce organize.

After a brief interval of bolder ​“popularist” appeals to social democracy and suggestions of price controls, Harris elected to speed run the Clinton campaign, blowing a possibly real lead to a polling tie, then losing as Trump once again overperformed. Notably, if Harris had managed another narrow win for the Democrats, the outcome would have to pass through what the conservative Wall Street Journal called a ​“secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires” with the goal of ​“a more organized, better funded and far broader effort to contest the outcome — a Stop the Steal 2.0.” Prominent members — which included billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and David Green, the Hobby Lobby founder — gave tens of millions of dollars to the cause. As it happened, Harris’ discomfort with distancing herself from the unpopular Biden and the inflation on his watch made the effort redundant.

Perhaps the case of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg most shows what a billionaire’s plaything our elections have become. In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife gave $419 million to a pair of nonprofits to disburse to thousands of local election offices dealing with funding problems during the pandemic. After criticism, Zuckerberg called the gift a ​“one-time donation,” withholding support this cycle. This time, instead, Zuckerberg called Trump’s dramatic pose after surviving an assassination attempt ​“one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen” and personally called Trump afterwards.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has been overjoyed at Trump’s victory, with the market surging in expectation of tax cuts and deregulation. Voters who chose Trump to deal a blow to elites, only to watch the formation of a government more nakedly committed to the very richest among us, may find themselves with dire voter’s remorse.