Therefore, the billionaires gather around Trump

From outcast to billionaire’s piggy bank. Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025 is very different compared to how it was in 2017. The list of mega-rich who previously snubbed the Maga president but are now open admirers has grown longer.

Donald Trump is admittedly born rich himself. But in the 2016 election campaign, it was not worth it for him to collect contributions from the possessed of the United States. The Republican party elite saw him as an unreliable populist, and hoped for other candidates. And the super-rich of the tech sphere, such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, stayed on the edge in the Democratic stronghold of California.

Fast forward to the corresponding election campaign eight years later, and it’s a completely different world. The tone was set early, as The New Yorker magazine reported from a fundraising dinner for billionaires in Florida last February.

– Donald Trump is a terrible person, said organizer Nelson Peltz, according to the newspaper.

– But our country is in bad shape, and we can’t afford Joe Biden.

– So we all have to support him, continued Peltz, referring to Trump.

Low low

In that situation, Peltz’s good friend Elon Musk had said that he intended to remain neutral in the presidential election. But it didn’t turn out that way at all.

Musk, who had bought Twitter (now X) two years earlier, came out during the summer as a strong Trump supporter. His arguments were similar to those long used by Trump, that the political establishment is a “swamp” that needs to be drained and that excessive bureaucracy stifles individual freedom as well as the economy.

Fellow billionaires like Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lay low for a few more months, but then picked up.

Bezos had already bought The Washington Post in 2013. When the newspaper’s editorial board wanted to take a stand for the Democrats’ Kamala Harris before the 2024 election – citing that Trump’s authoritarian signals are a threat to the United States – Bezos stopped the text and published his own opinion piece instead.

And Zuckerberg’s announced dismantling of fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram is seen to benefit, among other, far-right accounts that support Trump.

Long row

Musk donated billions to Trump even before the election, and now Bezos and Zuckerberg have also given money to the installation.

They are just the most famous of a long line of rich people who have joined Trump. What they get in return is clearer in some cases than in others. For example, Musk is given a formal role to propose far-reaching reforms and cuts to the new board.

Money has always determined a lot in US politics. But Trump takes it to a new level. American media have calculated that the billionaires who get posts in his new administration have combined wealth that exceeds the gross domestic product of upwards of 175 of the world’s approximately 200 countries.

It is at least 3,200 times as much as in the accounts of representative Joe Biden’s employees, US News writes.

FACTS Super rich who were given powerful positions by Trump

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