Americans Live in the 'United States of Oligarchy' With Elon Musk at the Top
Read an exclusive excerpt from journalist Casey Michel's new book exploring how the country's wealthiest are monopolizing U.S. democracy and propping up dictators and autocrats in the process.
Editor’s note: This piece is adapted from journalist Casey Michel’s new book, United States of Oligarchy, out now from Macmillan.
In June, Elon Musk achieved something that no other human has ever seen: he became a trillionaire. It didn’t last long, as SpaceX shares plunged in the weeks after he took the company public. But for many watching Elon’s net worth reach an astonishing 13 figures – even briefly – his transformation into a trillionaire was an indictment of everything from American wealth inequality to a confirmation of America’s descent into oligarchy. The fact that one man could amass so much wealth and use it to not only effectively appoint a sitting president, as we saw with Donald Trump in 2024, but also to help sic far-right forces from Britain to Germany and beyond was damning, and further evidence for why rampaging wealth inequality is a threat to us all.
Others, however, saw things differently. Analyst Novi Zhukovsky claimed that Musk’s ascent to trillionaire status is a “sign of our economic system’s strength.” For Musk’s backers, his meteoric rise – and the fact that he now controls more wealth than anyone ever before – is a testament to his know-how, his work ethic, and his ability to spy opportunities others simply couldn’t see.
Such an ascent, of course, erases all manner of things out of Musk’s history. As I detail in my new book United States of Oligarchy, Musk also owes much of his wealth to something else: a willingness to succor autocrats and dictatorships around the world, even if it’s against American interests. This is true most especially out of China, where Musk recently served as one of Beijing’s biggest boosters, publicly praising the country’s decades-long dictatorship, linking Tesla’s fortunes to Beijing’s, and helping the regime whitewash its ongoing genocide of Uyghurs.
Such pro-Musk boosterism also erases something else: how Musk has himself used his governmental connections, funding, and roles to benefit his own bottom line. In a certain sense, he is no different than many other wealthy Americans, who manipulate federal rules and regulations to enrich themselves. The only difference: given Musk’s personal net worth, he’s perhaps seen more success in turning the government into his own personal plaything – and in watching his own fortunes skyrocket as a result, especially after Donald Trump’s 2024 election.
An Oligarch Unelected, a Billionaire Unleashed
Musk began enjoying the fruits of Trump’s victory almost immediately. Even before Trump himself returned to the White House, Musk started outlining the contours of his new, so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A mix of both reactionary and revolutionary elements, DOGE resembled less a traditional federal department and more the kind of political operation – with handlers, with ideological requirements, with unfettered access – seen in dictatorial regimes elsewhere. Sicced across the federal government, DOGE employees tracked political fealty, infiltrated federal functions, and gained access to the kinds of financial systems that few outside the highest realms of American politics had ever known.
Mostly, though, DOGE slashed and burned, simply for the sake of slashing and burning. In program after program, department after department, DOGE took a flamethrower to services across the government. Foreign aid programs? Decimated. Park rangers? Canned. Nuclear security personnel? Axed. There was no rhyme, no reason, no rationale. The only thing that mattered was disemboweling as much of the federal government as possible. If a program had the term “diversity” or “equity” in it, it was specifically targeted – even if that meant funding for things like financial equity was eliminated.
All this was overseen by Musk – an oligarch unelected, a billionaire unleashed. Distracted by the trappings of office, as well as all the opportunities for self-enrichment suddenly spilling open, Trump appeared largely apathetic about DOGE’s destruction.
Musk, though, couldn’t have been happier. And why wouldn’t he be? While he was publicly deferential, in reality the center of political gravity had shifted. Musk’s presence, and DOGE’s successes, meant for the first time since Woodrow Wilson – who suffered a series of strokes in office, and ceded much of his presidential powers to his wife – the US had someone who could properly be considered a co-president. In Wilson’s case, the redelegation had been under wraps, kept out of the public eye. Not so with Musk, who exerted his power openly. It was as if Musk had chartered a fourth branch of the government – one above the legislative, out of reach of the judicial, and on par with the executive. An oligarchic branch of government: unaccountable, unassailable, in existence only because of the hundreds of billions of dollars that Musk and his co-oligarchs controlled.
No one benefited more from this arrangement than Musk – especially when it came to the oligarch’s personal finances. DOGE “gutted multiple regulatory agencies, including those that oversee [Musk’s] businesses,” wrote the Financial Times. “Among these, the [Food and Drug Administration], which monitors Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip company; the Federal Administration Authority, which regulates SpaceX; and USAID, which investigated Starlink.” All those concerns about oversight, all those questions about compliance, all those worries about potential investigations – all that disappeared, almost overnight. Musk now regulated the regulators.
He also watched all his other projects and investments boom. Thanks to his role by Trump’s side, Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) rose to far greater heights than ever before. Companies that once boycotted the platform – a site that had transformed into a sieve for frothing conspiracies since Musk’s takeover – were strongarmed into returning. The company’s financial freefall, in place since Musk first bought the platform, finally ended.
Additionally, with his access to Trump, and to as much federal data as he could digest, Musk had a leg up on any competitor in any area his companies operated. Already embedded in America’s space and defense contracting industries, Musk now had a wide-open field in front of him.
Take, for instance, one of the most preposterous – and potentially lucrative – projects under Trump’s new administration: the so-called “Golden Dome” missile shield. As envisioned by Trump, this kind of missile defense program would not only protect the American homeland from any inbound enemy launches, but could directly reward the man who had helped return him to the White House. In early 2025, SpaceX and its partners “emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part” of the new program, estimating preliminary costs at upward of $10 billion—a tidy turnaround for a single program. Yet that wasn’t all. As sources disclosed to Reuters, SpaceX “proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a ‘subscription service’ in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.” In other words, the proposed missile system shielding the United States would not actually be owned by the US itself, but would instead remain in the hands of the country’s wealthiest man.
From Musk’s end, it was an obvious pitch. (Why wouldn’t he push for as much as he could get, including personally controlling the missile umbrella protecting the US?) And it was a testament to just how much one man, and one oligarch, could get from the federal government. As one of the sources familiar with the proposal told Reuters, “There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.” When it came to American national security, there were no longer any checks or balances. There was only what this oligarch wanted – even if that meant having his fingers, and not the president’s, on the button that could protect the U.S. from a hellfire of incoming missiles.
At the time, it was difficult to see any through line to Musk’s and DOGE’s arson. It all seemed so haphazard, so ham-fisted – especially when DOGE had to undo some of its cuts, as it did with the nuclear weapons personnel it tried to fire.
But pulling back, certain trendlines emerge. In addition to targeting anything deemed sufficiently “woke,” there was a series of curious decisions made whose outcomes seemed to align, clearly and consistently, with the interests of certain American adversaries. In an administration supposedly dedicated to staring down America’s enemies – especially those in China, Iran, Venezuela, and more – Musk’s and DOGE’s malfeasance just so happened to aid many of those same adversaries, time and again.
Of course, it also aided Musk’s bottom line in the process. It was, in many ways, the ultimate endpoint for America’s descent into oligarchy: an unelected billionaire, benefiting from bending the federal government to his own ends, even if it meant that America’s adversaries benefited in the process. After all, who needs pesky things like democracy when there are billions, or even trillions, to be made?
Adapted from United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by Casey Michel, available now from Macmillan Publishers.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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He has not only super-trashed the environment with SpaceX, polluted Social Media with Grok child pornography, but now he is also unloading his rocket garbage on the moon!
Elon SKUM (I always mistype it) is a very rich fascist who enables a not so rich but incredibly stupid autocrat wanna-be. They and their enabling uber-wealthy (e.g., Peter Theil, who is a first-class wimp, by the way) need to never forget one thing: There are more of us (WE THE PEOPLE) than there are of them. The French proletariat had the right ideas in the late 1700s.