The Rise of America’s Broligarchy and What to Do About It

As Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and President Donald Trump’s top campaign donor, rampages through the federal government shutting down agencies and firing workers seemingly without any regard for his own conflicts of interest, the danger of concentrated private interests capturing our political system has never been more apparent.

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While the corrupting influence of big money over our government is not new, the specifics of this danger are different today than perhaps at any other time in our nation’s history. Tech billionaires, who already had enormous power, helped underwrite a winning presidential campaign in ways that would have been illegal just a few elections ago. And there are now fewer restraints than ever before on their ability, or the president they helped elect, to break through the checks and balances of our political system. This system, President Joseph Biden recently warned, can best be described as an “oligarchy.” Or, as others have dubbed, a “broligarchy.”

None of this means the situation is hopeless. Musk’s depredations are already encountering legal and political resistance, and it’s likely that the political pendulum will eventually swing back. When it does, those who care about the security of American democracy will need to be ready with fresh, bold solutions that meet the political moment, to ensure that our political system can actually respond to the needs of regular Americans.

Still, the question remains: How did we get to the point of having a tech billionaire campaign donor openly running huge parts of the federal government? And where do we go from here?

The rise of the broligarchy 

Three key changes have contributed to this singular moment. First, is the collapse of legal safeguards designed to curb the outsized influence of money in elections. As a result of Supreme Court decisions, most notably the notorious Citizens United decision from roughly 15 years ago, the wealthiest donors can play a more direct role in funding and running political campaigns than we have seen since the Gilded Age. In 2024, just 10 individual donors were able to supply nearly half of the money raised to support Trump’s candidacy. The total amount of money in the presidential race coming from people who gave at least $5 million more than doubled relative to 2020.

While the super PACs these individuals funded and ran were supposed to be separate from the president’s actual campaign, that was a legal fiction. Musk spent at least $288 million to help elect Trump and became the president’s leading surrogate. His PAC took on core functions of the campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts, and he also used his ownership of X (formerly Twitter) to boost pro-Trump content. Before the Citizens United ruling, none of this would have been legal.

Second, the presidency itself has been transformed. Recent decades have seen presidents from both parties erode laws and norms meant to restrain their power, increasingly without the sort of pushback from members of their own party that restrained their predecessors (including FDR). In his first weeks in office, Trump has accelerated this process, issuing unconstitutional executive orders and directives purporting to repeal birthright citizenship and directing OMB to freeze funding for thousands of federal programs in violation of an act of Congress. Trump also  fired at least seventeen agency inspectors general (internal federal government watchdogs who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse) without providing the necessary notice to Congress. Plus, Trump has reportedly allowed Musk and his private sector employees to access sensitive government computer systems, including the Treasury Department’s payment processing system, through which trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds flow each year.

Courts have temporarily blocked some of these actions. But ultimate review will be in the hands of the Supreme Court, which has itself taken a chainsaw to legal constraints on the president’s power over the executive branch, gutting the independence of key federal agencies and holding that former presidents are immune from prosecution even for certain blatantly illegal abuses of power. 

The combination of unregulated money in politics and expanded presidential power with fewer checks from Congress would be a recipe for more corruption under any president, but there are special dangers when they combine with Trump’s explicitly transactional approach to wielding power. The president campaigned openly on the promise to reward friends and punish enemies. He has once again (as in his first term) refused to meaningfully separate from his private business empire. There are plenty of indications that corporate leaders have gotten the message. Media companies that offended him are rushing to settle even seemingly meritless private lawsuits. And before Trump was even inaugurated, a Chinese billionaire who is fighting a fraud lawsuit from the Securities Exchange Commission poured $30 million into a new crypto venture started by the president and his family.

Campaign finance rules and checks on presidential power are collapsing just as leading technology corporations have gained massive power over our political system. This third development is in part a story of even greater concentration of wealth. The seven largest tech companies in the United States represent approximately one-third of the value of the S&P 500 and have a market cap greater than any non-US stock market in the world. Many commentators have noted that President Trump seated the leaders of three of these companies—Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg—ahead of cabinet members and other world leaders at his inauguration. Collectively, those three men have a net worth of nearly $1 trillion, a value that is approximately 200 times all the money spent in support of the presidential candidates in 2024.

But their power is not just in their massive wealth. As the journalist Ezra Klein has noted, the billionaires given front row inaugural seats were more than just the wealthiest men alive —they were among the biggest players in the so-called “attention economy.” 

This is the “tech-industrial complex” that President Biden warned of in his farewell address which has increasingly replaced traditional media as the source of political information for Americans (often tailored based on their personal data that these very companies collect) and which is largely unaccountable to the general public for how it can manipulate our understanding of reality. In particular, the combination of legal protections (such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), opaque algorithms, and lack of regulatory oversight (including over the mining of personal data of users) means that the public often has little sense of how tech companies collect and use information about users or what information is fed to them. 

Any of these changes by themselves would pose a challenge to the American political system. Taken together, they represent a looming crisis.

But as dire as all of this is, the situation is not hopeless. The United States is still a democracy, however imperfect, with a decentralized electoral system that is not easy to fully subvert. Eventually, as we’ve seen in previous eras of political corruption from the Gilded Age to Watergate, those in power are likely to overreach and prompt a backlash that will open the door to reform.

Indeed, just a few weeks into Trump’s first term, Americans  already express unhappiness with the role Musk and other billionaires are playing. This is on top of poll after poll showing that the overwhelming majority of voters are deeply unhappy with the role of money in our political system.

The challenge to resisting a new American oligarchy is not to convince the public that there is a problem, but to offer compelling solutions. In that regard, reformers have a lot of work to do. The typical solutions we and others resort to when discussing the outsized political role of billionaires and corporations include ethics reforms, closing campaign finance loopholes, and public financing for elections. All of these actions remain necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Indeed, the need to overturn Citizens United and other harmful Supreme Court decisions on campaign finance has never been clearer. So long as these decisions stand, unlimited money from a handful of donors can continue to pour into our campaigns, further reinforcing the ability of those with the most money to extract profits from our political system.

We must also re-establish the bedrock principle that nobody—including the president—is above the law. As long as that is in doubt, too many avenues for corruption will remain. 

Finally, the next wave of reform must also address the concentrated power of a few tech oligarchs as a core anti-democratic threat. In recent years, tech policy advocates in the United States have suggested many ways to check this power, from stronger antitrust rules, to Section 230 revisions, to mandating algorithmic transparency from social media platforms and AI developers. There are many reasons to explore such policies, but few are more important than ensuring this private power does not come to exceed the strength of our democracy. 

Cycles of corruption and excess followed by waves of reform are an enduring feature of American history, from the Progressive Era reforms that followed the Gilded Age to the passage of major ethics and campaign finance legislation after Watergate. But whenever the pendulum does swing back, will we be ready?

If there is any silver lining to the excesses we are now seeing, it’s that the stakes are now much harder to ignore. After Trump’s first term, Congress tried to pass democracy reform legislation that included some popular campaign finance reforms. Despite coming close, it didn’t pass.

It is now up to elected leaders and civil society to push back against the abuses of power we are seeing and lay the groundwork to fix our political system and make it work for everyone.

Above all, Congress must do more to fully reassert its authority as the “first branch” of our government. That means not only restraining the worst impulses of the Trump Administration, but ultimately passing bold campaign finance, ethics, and rule of law reforms that restore meaningful guardrails against self-dealing by those in power, undo as much as possible the damage done by Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions (and ultimately lay the groundwork for reversing them), and finally place meaningful checks on both presidential power and the emerging tech oligarchy.

There is still much we do not know about how the next four years will unfold. But one thing is clear: failing to address Americans’ concerns and restore their sense of ownership over their own government could be a mistake from which our democracy might not recover.

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