Money in U.S. politics is nothing new, but the scale of crass intervention in 2024 by mega-billionaire donors through super PACs was unprecedented. Now, corporate elites are indicating they could exert new levels of direct influence within the incoming Trump administration.
Elon Musk, worth over $430 billion, has rightly dominated this story. After spending nearly $300 million toward electing Donald Trump and his GOP allies, Musk, amid a minefield of conflicts of interests, has entered the president-elect’s innermost circle and is helping to shape the new administration.
But the breadth of direct corporate sway within the incoming regime goes beyond big campaign donations and individual players like Musk. What’s becoming clear is that key spheres of policy-making — energy, finance and tech — will be overseen by wealthy figures plucked from the industries they’re tasked to oversee.
Some nominees claim they’ll remove themselves from positions and investments that present competing interests. “All nominees and appointees will comply with the ethical obligations of their respective agencies,” Trump transition spokesperson Brian Hughes told Truthout in a statement. Still, watchdog groups worry that the new administration will be mired in corporate influence and conflicts.
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which monitors executive branch appointees, told Truthout that, while the first Trump administration was “catastrophically corrupt,” it still made gestures toward limiting conflicts of interest. But now, he says, “there are essentially no restraints being promised.”
Fossil Fuels
Trump rode to reelection vowing to “drill, baby, drill” and courting oil billionaires who donated handsomely to his campaign. Now, he’s tapped a clique of industry representatives and allies to oversee that agenda.
Chris Wright, a fracking industry diehard, is set to become Trump’s energy secretary, overseeing the nation’s energy programs and nuclear infrastructure.
Wright is CEO of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based fracking company with operations across major North American drilling fields. Liberty reported $4.7 billion in revenue and $556 million in profits in 2023. As of January 3, 2025, Wright owned over $50 million in Liberty Energy stock.
Wright famously drank fracking fluid claiming it was safe, and he boasts of the “many positive changes” of climate change, which he says is not a global crisis. Wright and his wife donated $540,000 toward Trump’s reelection.
It’s unclear whether Wright will divest from his energy holdings, though he’s reportedly resigning from the board of a nuclear company that receives federal subsidies.
During his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Wright said, “appropriate ethics people” had reviewed his investments, and he has “agreed to take all the appropriate action to avoid any real conflicts or perceived conflicts of interest.”
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for interior secretary, will play an even more influential role in the administration’s fossil fuel agenda.
Key spheres of policy-making — energy, finance and tech — will be overseen by wealthy figures plucked from the industries they’re tasked to oversee.
Burgum will oversee more than 500 million acres of federal lands that Trump wants to open up for oil drilling, and he’ll also serve as Trump’s energy czar and head of his National Energy Council, tasked with implementing Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
Burgum governs the nation’s third-largest oil producing state, where many politicians are close to the fracking industry. Burgum’s predecessor in North Dakota, John Dalrymple, now sits on the board of a coal corporation.
Burgum is a close ally of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a longtime Trump backer and key liaison with the fossil fuel industry.
Hamm’s drilling company, Continental Resources, is the largest oil and gas leaseholder in the state. Burgum has earned up to $50,000 leasing 200 acres of his farmland to Hamm and Continental for drilling.
Hamm organized the 2024 fundraiser where Trump asked for $1 billion from the oil industry in exchange for carrying out its agenda. Burgum attended the fundraiser alongside Hamm.
Chris Wright was Hamm’s top choice for energy secretary, and Wright’s wife, Liz Wright, co-hosted a Trump fundraiser last August that featured Burgum.
“The people with authority over energy and the environment are all committed to the destruction of the planet’s delicate ecosystem,” said Hauser.
A Cabinet of the 1 Percent
To the delight of Wall Street, Trump has promised to cut corporate taxes and weaken financial regulations. The private equity and hedge fund billionaires who backed Trump are now hoping to accelerate mergers and acquisitions and access trillions in retirement savings.
(Historically, private equity firms — huge investors in private markets that charge higher fees, are more opaque and make riskier investments — have been restricted from accessing 401(k)s and other defined-contribution retirement plans.)
Now, Trump is placing industry figures in top positions overseeing his economic policies.
Billionaire Howard Lutnick is set to be commerce secretary. Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a huge financial services firm, and chairman of BGC Group, another financial services firm.
“His companies are involved in nearly every sector in the U.S. economy,” wrote the New York Times after Trump’s announcement of his pick.
As commerce secretary, Lutnick will hold a powerful role over U.S. economic and business policies. He is also Trump’s transition co-chair, charged with filling 4,000 positions in the new administration.
Another billionaire, Scott Bessent, who donated more than $1.6 million toward Trump’s election efforts, is set to become treasury secretary. Bessent heads a hedge fund, Key Square Group, which manages hundreds of millions in assets.
While corporate executives have praised Bessent’s nomination, Hauser is skeptical. “He’s ludicrously unqualified for the job,” he told Truthout. “I think he is going to use the position to make himself and his friends richer.”
If confirmed, Bessent says he’ll divest from dozens of holdings and his hedge fund, while Lutnick says he’ll leave Cantor Fitzgerald and its spin-offs and divest his interest in those companies.
Other high-up appointees and nominees have close ties to finance. Stephen Feinberg, Trump’s pick for the deputy secretary of defense, the second-top Pentagon position, is a billionaire private equity executive, while finance executive Frank Bisignano, picked to head Social Security, was once the second-highest paid U.S. CEO, in 2017, during Trump’s first term.
Carceral Lobbyists and Consultants
Key Trump appointees and nominees are corporate lobbyists and consultants whose clients include those who profit from prisons.
Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, served two terms as Florida’s attorney general before joining lobbying and legal firm Ballard Partners in 2019.
To resist the onslaught of billionaire and corporate control of politics we need publicly funded elections and to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
A New York Times profile depicts Bondi as a corporate-friendly Florida attorney general, with an “open-door approach to companies” and “transactional philosophy” and, as a lobbyist, an ability to “help grease relations with the Trump administration.”
One of Bondi’s lobbying clients was GEO Group, the Florida-based private prison corporation. Bondi was a registered lobbyist for GEO Group in 2019 on the issue of “promoting the use of public-private partnerships in correctional services.”
Share prices for private prison companies have soared since Trump’s reelection. In December 2024, GEO Group announced $70 million in new capital expenditures to service Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) immigration jails. GEO Group says it is the largest service provider to ICE.
Bondi was also registered to lobby for the Florida Sheriffs Association and Major County Sheriffs of America through 2024. Her other corporate clients have included Amazon, Uber, General Motors and the mega-cruise line Carnival Corporation, who she helped snag an Oval Office meeting with Trump.
Trump’s chief of staff and transition co-chair, Susie Wiles, was also a lobbyist for Ballard, as well as another firm, Mercury Public Affairs, with numerous clients that included fossil fuel companies like Alliance Resource Partners, the fourth-biggest U.S. coal producer.
Tom Homan, Trump’s hardliner pick for “border czar” promising to oversee mass deportations, runs a consulting firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting LLC, that claims it’s helped its clients obtain “tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts.”
While its corporate clients are not disclosed, the firm says it “has been extremely successful in assisting small and large companies in business development with both federal and state governments,” and notes the firm’s close ties to government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and ICE.
Among other roles, Homan is also a “strategic advisor” for the Government Technology & Services Coalition (GTSC), a nonprofit association of “midsized company CEOs that create, develop, and implement solutions for the Federal homeland and national security sector.”
Past GTSC events include “ICE Day” conferences featuring Homan and past annual reports list over 200 member corporations across tech, finance and weapons industries.
Homan previously served as acting director of ICE during the first year of the Trump presidency.
Crypto-Corruption
The 2024 election saw a nexus of tech and cryptocurrency billionaires ardently back Trump. Elon Musk is the most well-known example, but other powerful people joined him.
These include Marc Andreessen, co-head of the largest U.S. venture capital fund for cryptocurrency and tech; Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, a top cryptocurrency exchange; the Winklevoss twins, who run the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange; and the influential Silicon Valley investor and former PayPal executive David Sacks.
This bloc has now emerged as a true force in U.S. politics, and it has a clear agenda aimed at deregulating AI and crypto industries.
“Silicon Valley is now kind of co-dominant with Wall Street, the traditional center of the economy, and deciding what sectors of the economy will get investment and grow,” economist Rob Larson, author of books on tech elites and the ruling class, told Truthout. “It’s conspicuous how many of those figures were so heavily evolved in this election.”
In particular, Silicon Valley billionaires oppose Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair, Gary Gensler, who they see as overregulating cryptocurrency, and Biden’s United States Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, a staunch antitrust regulator.
All told, crypto and tech billionaires poured hundreds of millions of dollars toward electing Trump and his GOP allies, and for this, they have been rewarded with major influence within the new administration.
Trump named David Sacks the “White House A.I. & crypto czar” overhauling regulatory policies toward these industries. Trump also announced a new “crypto advisory council” that will contain industry representatives to assist with this.
Trump is also nominating a new pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins, currently CEO of financial services company Patomak Partners. Trump seems likely to pick an industry-friendly chair for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel is also reportedly providing a “staffing pipeline” for the administration.
Commerce secretary nominee Lutnick has close ties to cryptocurrency. His firm Cantor Fitzgerald is a 5 percent owner of Tether, a privately run digital dollar that has been called the “de facto reserve currency for crypto,” and Lutnick seems intent on expanding his ties to crypto.
Trump’s own social media company, Trump Media and Technology Group, is in talks to buy Bakkt, a cryptocurrency trading venue whose former CEO is Kelly Loeffler, who Trump has nominated to head his Small Business Administration. Trump also has his own crypto project, World Liberty Financial.
“Trump is no longer pretending in any meaningful sense that he will rein in his own personal conflicts of interest,” says Hauser. “I think that the scale of corruption possible with things like Trump’s crypto investments and Truth Social are incredible.”
Deadly Appointments
To resist the onslaught of billionaire and corporate control of politics, Larson says we need publicly funded elections and to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. But he says winning “major progressive national policy changes” like these will “take a lot of absolute bedrock level organizing and building for some time.”
Meanwhile, Hauser says people focus more on the actions he’s taking, especially through his key appointments, than his outlandish speech.
“If we focus on him as the utterer of abhorrent things, then he can, in the shadows, give away the store to America’s worst corporations,” says Hauser, with consequences that go beyond “the abstract value of clean government.”
“Workers will die needlessly, consumers will be gouged, the environment will decline,” says Hauser. “These are tangible consequences of misgovernment.”
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