The three richest people in the world — billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — are scheduled to attend president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, showcasing the oligarchic partnership that the incoming administration will have with them and the corporate elite.
The three men will be seated on the platform of the event, next to Trump’s cabinet nominees and other elected officials, and will be very close to Trump himself as he’s sworn in and delivers his inauguration speech, a source with knowledge of the plans indicated. Their inclusion in the event comes as the three billionaires — whose total net worth is valued at $885 billion — have all made recent moves to benefit Trump’s campaign.
Musk, owner of the social media site X and the space venture company SpaceX, spent around a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected president, and campaigned with him during the election season. He will also be part of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” which will be tasked with making steep cuts to government spending — a position he will majorly benefit from, given the many federal contracts his companies receive. The department will likely zero-in on cutting social safety net programs, including Social Security.
Zuckerberg, who owns Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, has recently loosened content moderation policies on those sites, making them more tolerant of bigoted, far right voices in support of Trump and his MAGA agenda. Zuckerberg has also donated at least $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund — a move he will likely benefit from, as Meta faces a potential Federal Trade Commision (FTC) lawsuit in April amid allegations of acting as a monopoly. It’s possible that Trump could order the FTC to drop the claims.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, altered the paper’s policy on endorsing presidential candidates, blocking the editorial board from issuing its endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as was planned. Bezos, who also owns a space venture company called Blue Origin, is currently competing for huge government contracts to help fund that project.
In the past, the three billionaires — particularly Musk — have expressed far right and authoritarian viewpoints.
Musk, for example, has expressed support for far right political movements in Europe, and endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in that country’s upcoming elections. AfD is vehemently anti-immigration, and its leaders have repeatedly espoused antisemitism and downplayed the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Critics have lambasted both political parties for their promotion of billionaires in the presidential race (Harris had the open backing of multiple billionaires, too, including Mark Cuban), calling it a disturbing trend that allows a few wealthy individuals to have a major hand in the federal government’s decision-making processes.
“We’ve come a long way — and, in my view, not in a great direction — towards our elections being celebrations of billionaires, our elections being battlegrounds for billionaires to have their fights, to center their issues,” The Lever’s David Sirota said in a post-election discussion on Democracy Now! in November. “And essentially, what ends up happening is, is that the 2024 election, that was supposed to be about saving democracy, was essentially an exercise in destroying what was left of democracy, turning our elections themselves into an open celebration of the oligarchy.”
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