Despite all beliefs to the contrary, the billionaires who have been seen in President Donald Trump’s orbit since he won the presidency for a second time last November are not mere sycophants to his regime.
Former Washington Post political cartoonist Ann Telnaes should know. Last month, Telnaes quit her job after her editor refused to publish what turned out to be her last cartoon for the newspaper. In it, Telnaes drew Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI billionaire Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Mickey Mouse (representing media giant Disney/American Broadcasting Company) either kneeling or bowing face down in front of a statue of the president.
In explaining her decision to resign from the Post, Telnaes wrote, “Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press – and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.” For Telnaes and other critics, the attempts of billionaires and megacorporations to curry favour with Trump – as they work to protect their business interests and government contracts – have them behaving like yes-men.
It is true that paying fealty to Trump may make it seem like billionaires and trillion-dollar companies are caving in to a wannabe dictator. Yet it only seems that way. Zuckerberg’s recent call with shareholders is a case in point. In revealing his good news about market share gains and higher-than-expected profits from the end of 2024, Zuckerberg commended Trump for his support of companies like Meta. “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritises American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad … I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock,” Zuckerberg said.
For the wealthy and massive corporations, protecting their bottom lines is the end goal, with Trump as their means to their end. If it takes a bent knee or effusive praise to gain more market share or more power over the federal government’s purse, then so be it.
The easiest way to see that the billionaire class is in fact using Trump to reset the priorities of the federal government, and not allowing Trump to dictate terms to them, is through looking at their relationship with Trump over the past year. Take the hundreds of millions multi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Miriam Adelson, and Linda McMahon poured into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. During the post-election transition, Musk, Altman, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Apple’s Tim Cook, along with trillion-dollar corporations like Amazon, Meta, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, also contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s $150m inauguration fund. In the past few months, Disney-ABC settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump for $15m, while Meta settled for $25m over banning Trump from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6 insurrection in 2021.
With such enormous sums of money involved, at the very least, the billionaire set has been paying Trump to land leading roles in his administration. Of course, there are other likely reasons for their behaviour, such as more access to government contracts for their businesses, or general access and influence over the president as he sets future economic and social policies domestically and abroad. Whatever their reasons, these capitalists and corporations are not giving Trump this money simply out of a sense of deference.
Another way to gauge how the billionaire class has been using Trump would be through his activities since officially taking office on January 20. One need not look any further than Trump’s flurry of executive orders and memorandums authorising various agencies in the executive branch to take new and presumably business-friendly orders. Trump has signed and implemented dozens of executive orders since his inauguration. To be sure, some of these orders have their roots in Project 2025 or are primarily Islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-Black, and transphobic in nature.
This includes executive orders like Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, and Protecting the American People Against Invasion. But some of Trump’s orders are also about profits for one-percenters and for megacorporations and further deregulation and less federal oversight over business concerns. These kinds of orders include Declaring a National Energy Emergency, Establishing and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, and Unleashing American Energy. Trump’s orders have also been about abandoning clean energy initiatives meant to thwart climate change and allowing businesspeople like Musk and Ramaswamy to regulate how the federal government regulates their own businesses.
Perhaps the most sweeping and damaging of Trump’s edicts has come in the form of directives his administration has issued to halt the work of federal agencies. With the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, the Trump administration directed its various agencies to pause all their communication updates, public presentations, research studies, and related travel. In particular, agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes for Health halted their work. Some of this might be Trump’s way of getting back at these agencies for showing him up during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Yet one cannot help but assume that less competition from federal agencies working on cutting-edge treatments for cancer or working to prevent the next pandemic would ultimately provide profits for private industry, especially pharmaceutical corporations.
The recent flaps over a Trump administration memo to the Office of Management and Budget at the end of January to illegally pause all federal grants and loans led to a full day of outrage. “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” was how part of the memo read. This was the excuse Trump used to attempt to shut down pre-approved federal appropriations of potentially hundreds of billions of dollars.
Everything from food aid appropriations for WIC, SNAP, and school lunch programmes to federally subsidised student loans would have fallen under this order. Only, the National Council of Nonprofits teamed up with the NGO Democracy Forward to file a motion in federal district court, one that has blocked the implementation of Trump’s plan. The main reason for such a move would be to find the $500bn necessary for Trump’s artificial intelligence (AI) plan known as the Stargate Initiative, a project that Musk himself mocked on X, formerly known as Twitter, posting that “they don’t actually have the money”. This may also be why Musk and his aides were directly involved in gaining access to sensitive government databases, including ones with Social Security numbers, federal workers’ pay grades, and payment systems for Social Security and Medicare.
“The Trump administration is, in fact, very competent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidder,” author and journalist Sarah Kendzior wrote of Trump’s first term in office in Hiding in Plain Sight. The idea that the billionaire set and the massive corporations they represent are bending their knees to show deference to Trump or kissing his ring as if he were a king or Mafia boss is mostly not true. They are working hard to make sure that their visible veneration hides their increasingly visible hold on the presidency and the power and purse of the US government.
For it is with Trump in power for a second time that they can move closer to their ultimate goal: a capitalist system unchecked by the power of democratic institutions and government regulation, with an American people too confused and worn out to stop them. Despite all appearances, the narcissistic robber baron elite is in the process of making Trump and the US government their puppets, and not the other way around.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.