The Broligarchy Is Here

After a year of pseudo-populist blustering about empowering regular Americans and taking on the globalist elites, Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday afternoon — which happened to fall on MLK Day — featured a stage full of beaming tech billionaires whose interests fly in the face of the working-class coalition that delivered Trump a narrow victory in the 2024 election.

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were among the ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley elites who flanked Trump on the dais at his swearing-in. These men were seated in front of Trump’s Cabinet nominees during the ceremony after donating a record $250 million to the celebration. Tech baron and Republican mega-donor Peter Thiel had also thrown an inauguration party for Trump over the weekend at his own mansion, which Zuckerberg attended. In addition, Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, and French billionaire and LVMH chief Bernard Arnault were in attendance on Monday, with the latter placed very prominently in front of the cameras.

The optics of the multi-day celebration made one thing abundantly clear: The broligarchy is here. Rather than quietly using their wealth to influence politics behind the scenes, rich tech bros now literally have a seat at the table with the president of the United States.

Trump even directly acknowledged his billionaire buddies in his inaugural speech when addressing the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, which have killed dozens of people and wiped out historically Black neighborhoods. He lamented that the disaster is “affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now.”

“They don’t have a home any longer,” Trump said. “That’s interesting.” He then announced that his administration is going to “drill, baby, drill,” failing to acknowledge the connection between global warming – which is being accelerated by the fossil fuels industry – and the raging wildfires that he had just lamented.

In another bizarre moment later in the speech, news cameras zoomed in on Musk manically dancing and making a thumbs up over Trump’s shoulder as the president announced that American astronauts are going to “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” which is one of Musk’s personal life goals. Hours later, while speaking at a rally for Trump, Musk did what sure looked like a full Nazi salute.

Trump had already spent the months since his re-election packing his new administration with billionaires like Musk and soaking up their displays of fealty. He nominated an unprecedented 13 of them to his Cabinet, including inventing an entirely new “department” — the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), ironically — for Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead. (Ramaswamy dropped out of DOGE over the weekend and now plans to run for Ohio governor.) Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Trump’s re-election, campaigned with him, and has since threatened to fund a primary challenge against any Republican senator who votes against any one of Trump’s Cabinet picks.

Zuckerberg, lacking a symbolic Cabinet appointment, nonetheless demonstrated his loyalty to Trump by changing Meta’s policies a week before the inauguration to once again allow hate speech against women, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people on his platforms, as well as moving Meta’s content moderation teams from California to Texas. (Notably, Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission had been pursuing an antitrust case against Meta, which is now unlikely to proceed.) For his part, Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, spiked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the final days of the election.

With these powerful allies already in his pocket, Trump has started to return the favor by announcing an insidious “pay to play” scheme, wherein any person or company who spends at least $1 billion in the United States “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.”

Even before the inauguration, the broligarchy had become so explicit that Biden was moved to address it for the first time ever in his final days in office. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy,” he said in a speech last week. The statement frustrated some progressives, who have been urging him to use this language for a long time. “Now he tells us,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote on X. “Biden speaks out against dark money, for climate action, and for SCOTUS term limits. I pressed four years for this speech.”

A lot of good that did. Four days later, Trump stood on a platform next to the richest men in the world and essentially introduced us to our new overlords. These robber barons are sure to have a hand in making policy decisions that will sell out the very working-class people that put Trump back in the White House; so much for lowering the price of eggs.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the amount of Trump’s inauguration fundraising. Donors raised $250 million.