Consider: Musk has donated more $400 million dollars to Republican causes ahead of this year's midterm elections — far more than mega-donors Michael Bloomberg and George Soros have given to Democrats combined, according to media outlets including The Washington Post and CNN. This month, Musk's company SpaceX temporarily restricted Ukraine's use of the Starlink satellite system, causing some Ukrainian drones to fall from the sky. Kara Swisher, the longtime tech journalist and a Musk critic, recently told Morning Edition that no private citizen — and in this case the world's richest person — should be making wartime decisions.
David Nasaw, an emeritus professor of history at City University of New York, agrees. "The millionaires, billionaires and now trillionaires have always exercised undue power over the political system," says Nasaw, who has written a biography of Andrew Carnegie, the late 19th century steel magnate. "But there's never been anyone like Musk." Nasaw notes that Musk was the first person to cross the trillionaire threshold.
He also oversaw DOGE, which dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, a massive, congressionally created foreign aid operation. Over the years, Musk's companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, have received more than $30 billion in federal contracts, subsidies, loans and tax credits.
"I call it an unholy alliance," says Nasaw. "He makes money and then he returns that money to keep those who are friendly to him in power." NPR reached out to Musk for comment, but received no reply. Nasaw says the current democratic system can't check someone like Musk, and argues that Congress should pass laws raising taxes on billionaires and limiting campaign spending.
Otherwise, Nasaw says: "Democracy is in a death spiral towards oligarchy." But Richard White, an emeritus history professor at Stanford, says Musk's power isn't unique, historically. In fact, it pales in comparison to J.P. Morgan, the dominant banker of the Gilded Age, which encompassed the final decades of the 19th century.
In 1895, Morgan bailed the U.S. out of a financial crisis. Morgan thought that he was a co-partner with government," says White. "Once you've saved the United States from having to default on its promise to pay its debts in gold, you realize you have a great deal of influence." It didn't last.
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