Front Burner - Donald Trump’s billionaire administration

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Donald Trump is building the wealthiest cabinet in American history with 13 billionaires set to be part of his administration. That of course includes his vocal backer and X CEO, Elon Musk. But it’s not just the ones joining him in office. A parade of CEOs and business giants have met with him over the past month in Mar-A-Lago including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Canada’s Kevin O’Leary.Even in a country where the super rich have always had an outsized role in American life, this moment stands out. But does it compare to the past and other administrations and why are they aligning themselves with Trump so publicly now?To explore this shift we’re joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University and the author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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So follow us and don't miss an episode. So follow us and don't miss an episode. So follow us and don't miss an episode. So follow us and don't miss an episode. So follow us and don't miss an episode. Elon Musk is among an unprecedented 13 billionaires tapped to be part of the incoming Trump administration, making it the wealthiest in American history. And outside of Washington, a parade of CEOs and investors have stopped by Mar-a-Lago to meet with the President-elect, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook. Today we're going to discuss the outsized role and influence that these billionaires are playing in American life and beyond. How does it compare to the past and other administrations?

Why are they so publicly aligning themselves with Donald Trump now? What does it all say about where the US could be headed? To do all of this, I'm joined today by Quinn Silbodian. He's a professor of international history at Boston University and the author of Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Quinn, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Yeah, good to be here. So there's been a lot of coverage about how billionaires have been cozying up to Trump

the last while since he won the election. There's Musk, of course, but the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, even Hussein Sejuani, an Emirati billionaire developer, have all visited Mar-a-Lago over the last couple of months. We'll talk about a few Canadian examples too. Business man and personality, Kevin O'Leary was there this weekend. Shopify CEO Toby Lutka has said that Trump's tariff threats tied to more border security while harsh were well within

the US's rights to demand. This class of the super wealthy hasn't always blatantly been on his side. And so what's been the history with them? Yeah, I mean, it's a funny topic in a way, because obviously one doesn't want to sort of start with the assumption that suddenly, you know, the wealthy have started to meddle with American politics, right? I mean, America has a very long tradition of coziness between a kind of elite plutocratic class and those people who are making the laws. It's actually been more uncommon in

American history for there to be some kind of distribution of power or something like the power of organized labor inside of the government. Most of the time it's been a kind of, you know, beneficial arrangement for the wealthiest in the country. But at the same time, this is like a step shift, right? I mean, it's a scale shift. The pure numbers are actually pretty startling.

If you look at Joe Biden's cabinet, the combined net worth was just over 100 million. And the combined net worth of Trump's cabinet is expected to be in order of magnitude more. The Trump cabinet will have more billionaires and centimillionaires than any in history. The billionaires on the official cabinet will have a combined net worth of over

13 billion dollars. Now, that is not including, of course, Elon Musk or Trump's new billionaire ambassadors. So it really does, you know, make us ask the question that you're asking, which is like, what's going on here? How is this going to shift his policies, if at all? And why are they kind of being so out in the open? There's a couple of big differences I see with this round of billionaires courting the White House. The way that we historically look at, you know, money and power is often kind of lurking in the background, right? And this seems way more in your face to me.

Right. I mean, the closest analog you would think would be the sort of robber barons of the Gilded Age. Or you think about people like Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie, who were building the infrastructure of American society, building the museums and the libraries and Dowing Universities. And then between the two world wars, American foreign policy was basically conducted by private actors. I mean, it was the big bankers, JP.P. Morgan, and people like that who were in

Europe and kind of, you know, negotiating on behalf of the United States. But since the Second World War, things kind of, you know, although still benefiting disproportionately the wealthy, kind of went more into the background. And the more typical way I think we would think about billionaires making their opinions felt in the White House in the last several decades would be through more covert means like lobbying, campaign donations, funding a big ecosystem of think tanks and academic programs. People coming out, as you say, going down to Mar-a-Lago and kind of kissing the ring is kind of a shamelessness that in the past would have assumed to be, you know, bad politics.

So I think on the one hand, we seem to be in an era where, you know, the ultra wealthy are actually not that stigmatized, despite the kind of burning moment of attacks on the 1%. I think we're in a time when people really admire the rich. They see themselves in the famous expression as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And what's unusual though about this is the people who are being sucked into the cabinet or tapped for the cabinet are not necessarily coming from finance. So that was the usual revolving door that characterized the relationship to the very wealthy over the last several decades. It'd be people coming from Wall Street, basically, right? That was the place that you would imagine

a kind of move back and forth. What's- Right, and now you have Elon Musk. Now you have Elon Musk, you have Vivek Ramaswamy getting involved, you have very loud voices from the venture capitalist class, David Sacks. Another member of the PayPal mafia has been tapped to be the AI and crypto czar inside of the new administration. So that suggests a real kind of like

shift in the center of American profit away from just Wall Street and then towards you know, tech, you know, filtered through, of course, the stock market. But you've also got people who I think, fair to say, are a little bit more coy, right? Like I'm thinking Jeff Bezos, who didn't vocally throw his support behind Trump, but he did prevent the Washington Post, which he owns

from endorsing Kamala Harris. And so just what does that indicate to you? Well, I mean, I think a lot of this is helpfully compared to Trump won, right? I mean, I think a lot of this is, you know, helpfully compared to Trump one, right? I mean, the thing about being in the second Trump era is we can, we don't have to sort of operate and speculate like without a safety net. We actually know a bit about what happened the first time around. And the first time around those very kind of people, Zuckerberg, Bezos, were often vocally opposed to Trump, even sort of arguing that they were part of something like a resistance against this incoming, you know, tyrant, smashing up democracy and whatever.

The appropriate thing for a presidential candidate to do is to say, I am running for the highest office in the most important country in the world, please scrutinize me. You know, that's not what we've seen. And to try and chill the media and sort of threaten retribution, retaliation, it just isn't appropriate. We have freedom of speech in this country. This time around, they've been, as you say, kind of coy or non-committed and sort of playing both sides of the possible outcome. I mean, amongst Fortune 500 CEOs, Kamala Harris still had more support than Trump, so it wasn't quite the case that all of the wealthiest people in America suddenly became MAGA overnight. But most of them did, you know, take a more circumspect attitude. And the question then is why? I think the answer is they profited greatly

from the first Trump administration. There were massive tax cuts. That's really Trump's only legislative achievement from the first administration was the 2017 tax cuts, which are all set to expire next year, will almost certainly be renewed, if not made permanent, through Congress, which, if you're rich, is just materially a huge plus. I wanted to ask you specifically about Mark Zuckerberg. He's been rolling out a series of changes at Metta this past week that's gone over well

with Trump and his camp. He's canceled their DEI initiatives, cut their fact-checker program, and loosened restrictions around speech about things like immigration, gender, sexuality. He even brought UFC CEO and Trump ally Dana White onto Metta's board. And for someone who apologized in front of Congress in 2018 for Facebook's role in spreading misinformation and hate speech and even banned Trump from the platform after January 6th, this is a stark change, right? And so what, just tell me more

about what you make of that shift. Yeah, I mean, it's almost sort of being played out in an exaggerated way in Zuckerberg's own kind of self-presentation, right? I mean, he was long ridiculed as kind of this, you know, quintessential gormless kind of soy boy of Silicon Valley, and now he's bulked himself up. He's doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He wears a gold chain.

He's wearing these kind of like streetwear style oversize t-shirts. So, I mean, it's hard not to just psychologize something happening with him personally, but I think in general, he stands in for the reason why all of big tech has become much more dovish on Trump. And that's a few like really specific asks that they now realize they're going to get in the administration. One is stopping antitrust. So the Biden administration had quite aggressive efforts at breaking up the monopolies of things like Google, things potentially like Metta. Lena Kahn was one of the most progressive and interesting critics of neoliberalism. She was the head of the FTC. Big Tech is happy to see an end to Biden's efforts to regulate AI, to sort of regulate

things as a potential safety risk. That's going to be out the window. And another kind of under the radar thing is this tax that Harris was proposing on unrealized capital gains. So when you're in tech, you make a lot of your money through stock options and through the accrual of the value of the company that you own parts of. And normally that goes astronomical, but it doesn't really matter because you're only gonna have to pay taxes on it when you cash out, when you sell your shares. But there was a serious proposal on the books to start taxing people based on how much the value of their stocks were going up from year to year, which if you're someone like Zuckerberg

or a venture capitalist, that's like a real nightmare because it means like, uh-oh, you're gonna have to suddenly have to pay some tax on these outlandish valuations of the companies you're part of. It strikes me. These guys that we're talking about, they have so much control over the mediums by which people consume information, right? So Elon owns Twitter, Zuckerberg, even OpenAI, right? Sam Altman, Bezos and the Washington Post, Patrick Soon Chong, owner of the LA Times. I'm thinking a little bit of that Washington Post cartoon that showed a bunch of these guys kneeling to Donald Trump,

it actually didn't run and it caused a bunch of controversy. But how hard or how much more difficult do you think that it's going to be to raise questions and to try to push back against some of the narratives here, considering the control over the information ecosystems? Yeah, absolutely. It's a massive problem. I mean, I think you basically have only two options, right? You either hope that there's still space on platforms owned by people with dubious politics, like Elon Musk and Axe,

in which you can nevertheless, you know, use that open space for criticism, for organization, for mobilization for a different kind of a future. And that's not a very encouraging prospect. The other option is to kind of a future. And that's not a very encouraging prospect. The other option is to kind of help boost the existing alternative sources of consent creation and enlightenment and media production. So whether that's publicly funded media in the United States or user funded outlets like, you know, democracy now or drop site or the intercept. These things are in the balance sheets of someone like Musk. I mean, it's

impossible to overstate how tiny the kind of capitalization of some of these media outlets are, right? A joke that was going around apparently, the sort of VC Silicon Valley in-group was that they should just buy MSNBC because it was annoying them, right? And that would actually be very easy to do. They would, you know, X is worth more than New York Times, which is by any measure the most successful newspaper in the United States.

So we're really working with like a really vestigial media landscape here to mount like actual critical debate or discussion against the expanding power of tech platforms. And there is not a really kind of optimistic way of looking at that. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. I just want to spend a bit more time on Musk.

I think it's probably worth talking about the fact that he's not just focused on the United States, right? I mean, he's also talking about, he's sort of support behind the far-right German party, the AFD. He's been attacking the UK's Kirst Stammer and amplifying Islamophobic rhetoric. Elon Musk using his social media platform X to launch an onslaught against the PM, accusing him of being complicit in the rape of Britain for failing to tackle grooming gangs while

personally attacking one of Stammer's ministers. He's certainly been quite obsessed with Canadian politics recently, particularly in the wake of our prime minister stepping down. You know, I wouldn't mind just hearing you talk a little bit more about the dangers when the richest man on earth has this kind of platform to spout off about whatever he wants. The way I look at it is in 2017, everyone was worried about Steve Bannon creating a kind of transatlantic far right. And Musk is basically doing that now too, but with a greater wealth behind him

than anyone else has ever had in modern history. So we are in completely uncharted territory as to what the outcome of that might be. It seems to be limited so far right now just by the attention span of Musk himself. So for example, in the UK, he was backing Nigel Farage. He was a very credible far-right candidate in the sense that he gets a decent amount of vote share. But then he just kind of, you know, they got annoyed with each other and so now they've split

and they can't work together anymore. Nigel Farage's mistake, it seems, was not backing Elon Musk all the way after his incendiary attacks on the government over historic child grooming scandals. The owner of X suggested Keir Starmer failed to pursue rapists when chief crown prosecutor and promoted a video of jailed far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson, whom he says was put in prison

for telling the truth about Britain. He was actually jailed for contempt of court. And so he's only really supporting Tommy Robinson, who's a much more, even more far-right Islamophobe. And we'll see how long an alliance like that would last. But it is true that his alliances are more concrete with someone like Giorgia Maloney, for example, in Italy, who's coming from a fascist derived party, the brothers of Italy, where really concretely

in the last couple of weeks, she has started to say that she's interested in using Starlink to provide satellite internet for the Italian military instead of the EU's own service, which they're developing called IRIS. So it's a really large kind of EU wide initiative to allow for competitors to something like Starlink. But after a few appearances on stage at sort of far-right ideas festivals by Musk

and some kind of like, you know, cozying up for the camera, now they suddenly feel like they would rather work together. And so she's basically defecting from an EU program to align with Musk. And I think that that's probably something we'll see more of in the next four years is people like Musk and Palmer Lucky and Peter Thiel and Zuckerberg using the power of the US state to kind of crack open markets that have been otherwise kind of resistant to them. You mentioned Peter Thiel. He's lumped in there with Elon Musk and the likes. I know he has a very close relationship with the vice president-elect, J.D. Vance. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about what they believe in and what sets

them apart from other wealthy CEOs, ideologically speaking. This is something I've written about in the book that you mentioned at the top. It's crack up capitalism. It begins actually with Peter Thiel in 2009 saying that he no longer believes that capitalism and democracy are compatible and democracies are just sclerotic and they strangle innovation. So he says we need to actually just create more states. We need to have hundreds or even thousands of more new states that we can experiment with the same way we experiment with companies. So he was really on that kick for a few years

and was even funding people to create little mini states out in the ocean. But what I see or what I describe in the book is he's basically like, well, why go out and create a new state if you can just take over an existing one? That's much easier. And now the kind of privileged relationship that he and his kind of group of like-minded Silicon Valley folks have to the federal government means that they can kind of operate behind the scenes

and kind of push through ideas without too much scrutiny or exposure. So a good example here is this new department of government efficiency that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up. The New York Times is just reporting that they're having long discussions between them and other, they their sort of fellow

podcasters from Silicon Valley or whatever. But it's all on signal. So there's no trace of what they're actually saying, which is sort of directly against the idea of the kind of disclosure rules and transparency rules that a government ought to operate behind. And furthermore, things like SpaceX, OpenAI are operating as private companies. So they don't have a public IPO. There's no kind of disclosure reports. So even as companies, these tech undertakings are becoming more secretive. And I think that if you think about their effort is to kind of privatize more and more of the state and remove more and more of government from democratic oversight, you know, operate a country more and more like a private firm, then this ideology is like very consistent from one of these fellows to the next.

Related to that, there was this really interesting study out of Northwestern University last year. It found 11 percent of billionaires around the world have held or sought political office, but it also found that autocracies have higher rates of billionaire participation in politics. China has the highest rate at 36 percent. And people like Bernie Sanders and others have warned that the U.S. is moving towards becoming an oligarchy Do you think that's true? Or do you think it's already an oligarchy given everything that we're talking about today? I mean, it's certainly accelerating in that direction and

almost more interesting for me is the question of Why people don't seem to be particularly offended by that, you know, on average, right? And of course, there are people that might tune into this podcast or discuss it in other arenas who are offended and annoyed and even appalled. But on average, you know, eight years of discussion of Trump's hypocrisy, you know, greed, wealth, corruption, you know, literal felonies, etc., actually didn't deter average Americans in the majority from supporting him as a political candidate, from voting for him for president, right?

So there is, I think, a kind of culture of impunity when it comes to the wealthy that is kind of becoming like a mass mentality in the US. And there's a couple of things that I kind of attribute that to. I mean, one actually is crypto, which we discussed, which was a pretty minor phenomenon at the time of Trump's first election. It was worth a few hundred dollars for a Bitcoin. And as of sort of January 1st, it was one hundred thousand dollars a Bitcoin. If crypto know, as of sort of January 1, it was $100,000 a Bitcoin. If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It's going

to be, it's not going to be made anywhere else. So this is pretty almost a magical manifestation that, you know, sucks in the imagination of a lot of really young people, young men in particular, this seems like, you know, you can create value out of nothing, anyone can get rich, you just have to log on and, you know, have the right grindset and watch the right YouTube videos. So this, this kind of idea of, you know, self-help and self-actualization that pans out as self-enrichment, I think is an ideology that really helps to cleanse any stigma from rule by the wealthy. It makes them just like people who grind it harder. So there's that.

I think also, you mentioned Dana White being appointed to the meta board. I actually think the popularity of things like UFC and worldwide entertainment and the wrestling is not to be underestimated, like this world of just getting into the ring and just like beating yourself black and blue, but you know, subjugating your opponent is, you know, it's an ethos too. It's entertainment, but it's also like a way of looking at other humans. And the huge takeoff in popularity of that.

Since COVID in particular, why? Because they were able to set up an arrangement where they were fighting in an island off the Dubai coast, COVID free so people could stream it while they were in lockdown has led to this, just this kind of a certain celebration of unbridled masculinity and aggression that I think is just becoming a kind of excusing

and legitimating ideology for a lot of this stuff. Man, you pulled a lot of threads together in that last answer, that was great. Thank you so much, Quinn. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Absolutely, it was nice to talk to you as well. Music Alright, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Music For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.