The looming US presidential inauguration casts a long shadow. Not the least important uncertainty that feeds the fears of many concerns the role of Donald Trump intimate Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.Musk is even more notorious than the president-to-be for reckless speaking, not least about Britain, for which he seems to have conceived a weirdly violent hostility. He characterizes our country as “a tyrannical police state” and believes we’re “going full Stalin,” while predicting “civil war is inevitable.”On both sides of the Atlantic, money has always talked. For centuries, the wealthy have been buying politicians, or shares in them. Though Rupert Murdoch doesn’t bribe our rulers, he secures the slavish obeisance of many through their fear of his vast media empire. What seems remarkable in 2025 is the emergence of the ultra-wealthy from the closet, or at least from the gilded towers from which they run their companies, to wield power as members of governments, or to seek to do so. Musk apparently discussed a possible gift to the far-right UK Reform party of £100 million ($125 million), immeasurably the largest political handout in British history and a naked attempt to buy an election. Such an outcome became remote when Musk texted dismissively about Reform leader Nigel Farage. But even the speculation rattled a lot of cages, fueling debate about the role of the rich in politics. Musk is the wildest card in the pack that will start being dealt on Jan. 20. Photographed daily at the side of the incoming chief executive, Musk doesn’t conceal his eagerness to translate possession of billions into power over the destinies of nations, above all obviously the US. It is impossible to doubt his erratic genius, reflected not only in his auto-industry achievement at Tesla Inc. but also in the SpaceX project. Yet Musk, unlike Trump, has never offered himself for election to anything. He has never sought to ask the American people, never mind any other nation, for any mandate outside his wallet. As owner of X, formerly Twitter, Musk wields additional power. Among the motives for throwing his support behind Trump is an obvious determination to fight any attempt — such as is often mooted by Democrats — to break up over-mighty social media giants. Not only X, but also Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. possess greater clout than do most national governments. In many jurisdictions, they are able to leverage this to escape significant taxation. Their bosses are less politically conspicuous than is Musk, but their dominance is indisputable. For more than a decade after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post he was deemed an enlightened, non-interfering proprietor. But at this most recent US election, he stunned the media world by ordering the Post not to endorse a candidate. Few people doubted that his motive was to protect Amazon from a vengeful President Trump. Likewise, since the election a procession of the richest Americans have trooped to Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower to kiss the ring of the victor, to whom many provided campaign funding.I have been searching my history store cupboard, to consider how far what is happening is unprecedented. Business influence on democratic politics has been a force for centuries. Many pundits have deplored the willingness of governments to stroke the hand of wealth, whether honestly or crookedly got. In 1873, the British novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a brilliant, furiously angry denunciation of the worship of money, entitled The Way We Live Now: A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its wall, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give great dinners and get into parliament and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.Any reader of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit, a superb 2014 study of the Theodore Roosevelt era, knows the power wielded by the Carnegies, Rockefellers and other ruthless American monopolists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such characters are comparable with today’s moguls. But as president, Teddy Roosevelt showed the courage to shrink the barons’ power, while it is doubtful that any modern US administration will act likewise. Trump himself has achieved the hitherto undreamed-of feat of translating a presidential candidacy into a profit center. Meanwhile, the old newspaper tycoons, most notably William Randolph Hearst in the US and Lords Northcliffe, Beaverbook and Rothermere in Britain, used their titles ruthlessly to promote political causes — which included fascism in the case of the 1930s Rothermere. Beaverbrook, once asked by a government inquiry why he owned papers, replied shamelessly “to make propaganda.” It was said of the Canadian power broker that he never espoused a cause that was both honorable and successful. Yet none of that generation, or the radio and TV moguls who followed them, wielded a tithe of the power of modern social media bosses. It is a characteristic of many of the rich with political ambitions that they employ their wealth as a club with which to beat down those who oppose their wishes in great things or small. One who sought to distort British politics, while himself not a significant UK taxpayer because domiciled abroad, was Sir James Goldsmith, who founded the Referendum Party, which waged a pioneering campaign to get Britain out of Europe.Goldsmith was a shameless bully. During the 1997 general election campaign, in which as a newspaper editor I heaped scorn on himself and his candidates, his lawyers telephoned me, to pass a message: “Sir James has instructed us to tell you that when the election is over, he intends to destroy you.” Goldsmith did indeed attempt — unsuccessfully — to get me sacked.Such brutishness makes many of us uncomfortable about billionaires who seek to play with the levers of government. It now seems unlikely that Musk will make good on his threat to give the British Reform Party a disruptive £100 million, but there is little doubt that he will continue to exploit his stupendous wealth to influence political outcomes. It is in the best interests of all our democracies for Musk, and indeed all rich men, to stick to making money, and leave governance to professional politicians and voters. Fat chance.
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