Paul Waldman
Nov 04, 2025
Earlier this week, Oxfam America released a striking report on inequality in America, which laid out some numbers on how fast the richest are increasing their wealth:
In the past year alone, the 10 richest U.S. billionaires got $698 billion dollars richer. Since 2020, their inflation adjusted wealth is up 526%. The richest 0.0001% control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of U.S. history defined by extreme inequality. In 2025, the share of assets owned by the top 0.1% hit its highest on record since the Federal Reserve began publishing data in 1989 (12.6%), as did their share of the stock market (24%). The richest 1% own half the stock market (49.9%), while the bottom half of the U.S. owns just 1.1% of the stock market.
This is a multi-faceted story, but I want to focus on one part of it for the moment. There are lots of rich and powerful people who aren’t on social media, don’t appear on magazine covers, and whom you’ve never heard of. But the oligarchy we’re living under now is, more than anything else, a tech oligarchy. Let’s take a look at top ten names on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, as of Monday:
Warren Buffett is the exception here, but nine of the top 10 richest people in America are from the tech industry.
And it just so happens that except for former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — who has been gently critical of the Trump administration on some policy issues — all of the tech honchos are either ideological conservatives (like Elon Musk, Michael Dell and, now, Mark Zuckerberg) or at the very least have allied themselves with the administration and heaped praise on Trump (like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Larry Ellison). Either individually or through their companies, they all donated to Trump’s inauguration, his ballroom, or both. And that doesn’t count Trump’s many tech supporters and allies who aren’t on the top 10 list, like Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and many others.
In previous eras, it wouldn’t have been worth mentioning that the richest people in the country were right-wingers; of course they were. They hated unions, wanted a government that didn’t bother to regulate them (or could be captured to write regulations that they designed), and were appalled at the idea of paying taxes.
But Silicon Valley was supposed to be different, and it was — for a while. When Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican convention it was an oddity; he was the only prominent tech leader who came out publicly for Trump. Since then there has been a transformation in the tech industry’s politics.
This supposedly happened because the tech lords were radicalized by the experience of the Biden years. That has many dimensions to it, but among their complaints is that the Biden administration was cruel to them, at the same time that they were getting fed up with covid restrictions, uppity employees, and people on Twitter telling them they were a bunch of jerks, which hurt their feelings in deep and profound ways.
But how did these guys actually do when Joe Biden was in office? You’ll never guess: They got way richer over those four years. Most of them more than doubled their wealth between 2020 and 2024. I ran the numbers:
I’m sure they’d all say that their rapidly expanding hoards were due only to their brilliance and hard work, but even if you accepted that laughable notion, it certainly appears that having a success-hating commie like Biden in office didn’t do much to hurt their bottom lines.
Yet they absolutely despised Biden, and have come to love Trump. It may have a bit to do with how much taxes they’ll pay (rich people would literally rather make less money but pay less in taxes than make more money but pay slightly higher taxes; it’s a purely psychological phenomenon that has nothing to do with rationality). But more than anything else, it’s about their feelings. They don’t just want to be rich beyond all imagining, they want a constant flood of praise and adulation. The fact that they live in a world in which sometimes people — even politicians — tell them that they’re assholes fills them with a rage that can only be assuaged with the embrace of a cruel and vengeful politics.
We’re seeing it right now with all the New York billionaires (a different group than the Silicon Valley billionaires, but they share some things in common) who have spent the last few months panicking about the possible election of Zohran Mamdani. They’ve poured millions into the rotting trash pile that is the campaign of Andrew Cuomo, and threatened to leave the city if Mamdani wins. But what exactly are they afraid of? That under Mamdani, New Yorkers will get free bus rides? That they might have to pay a tiny bit more in taxes, money they’d never even notice? That while their own kids are tended to by a team of nannies, other people’s kids might get free child care? What the hell do they care? But apparently, they do, and they don’t like it.
Until now, many of these oligarchs — especially the ones in Silicon Valley — have been flailing around somewhat in their political activities, because they only started paying attention to politics recently and still don’t quite understand how it works. But they’re starting to learn, and in the coming elections they’ll be putting a lot more money in than they have before. They could be the most important funding source in the 2026 and 2028 campaigns. It’s something to keep a close eye on. |
