American Oligarchs
By Joel D. Joseph
An oligarchy is a small group of rich people having control of a country. An oligarch is a rich business person with strong political connections.
Modern oligarchs in Russia came to wealth, power and influence in the early 1990s. When Soviet Union collapsed, the oligarchs took advantage of the collapse of major government-run institutions, including industry, banking, oil, agriculture and mining. These are the Russian oligarchs that took over state industries that were there during the Soviet era, and in 1991, there was a battle for who was going to run these industries.
American oligarchs are different than Russian oligarchs because most American oligarchs are entrepreneurs, or wives thereof, who built businesses from scratch.
I have identified eight American Oligarchs, all billionaires, and all are owners of major media publications. Together they control many of the major newspapers in the United States. Together they have donated billions of dollars to politicians. Here are the eight American oligarchs:
1. Elon Musk
2. Jeff Bezos
3. Patrick Soon-Shiong
4. Laurene Powell Jobs
5. John Henry
6. Glen Taylor
7. Miriam Adelson
8. Marc Benioff
Elon Musk is the most influential and obnoxious of these oligarchs. Musk earned his billions with Tesla, SpaceX and other ventures. He is currently the richest man in the world. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and has given the Trump 2024 campaign hundreds of millions of dollars. Musk was born in South Africa (as was Patrick Soon-Shiong). He moved to the United States when he was in his early twenties to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford, but dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq computer company for $307 million in 1999. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002 Musk acquired US citizenship. That October, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, in 2002. Two years later, Musk was an early investor who provided most of the initial financing in Tesla Motors.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. Recently, Bezos overruled the editorial board of the Post who wanted the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris for president. The Washington Post has endorsed candidates for the past fifty years, until 2024. Mr. Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post ended decades of ownership by the Graham family-- which had steered the paper through its legendary coverage of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers-- and signified a new era of expansion under one of the world's most famous entrepreneurs.
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