Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy

WHAT nation can you fit into the Capitol Rotunda? Answer: somewhere between a Portugal and a Thailand. Each country’s total household net wealth was US$1.3 trillion, give or take, according to the latest available figures from a few years ago. This is around the accumulated fortune of the billionaires who turned up for Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in Washington on Jan 20. Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, a luxury empire, and Europe’s richest man, represented the old continent’s fat cats. Mukesh Ambani, an Indian industrialist who is Arnault’s Asian opposite number, stood in for the Global South’s.

However, it was Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (collective net worth: US$911 billion, a bit shy of three Luxembourgs) who got the most attention – and better seats than the incoming Cabinet. Only the Trump family stood between the tech moguls and the 47th president as he took the oath of office.

This proximity to power – literal and figurative – alarms many. In his farewell address from the White House five days earlier, Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America” and of a rising “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country”. It is not just Americans who are worried. On Jan 18, Reuters reported that Germany’s ambassador to the United States, a sober Teutonic type not normally given to hyperbole, had confidentially alerted the government in Berlin that, among other disruptive moves by the second Trump administration, “big tech will be given co-governing power”.