2025 was the year of technoligarchy. The tech industry’s political investments paid off spectacularly as Trump returned to the White House with a Republican trifecta. Some technology executives secured Cabinet and other advisory roles, and far more were regularly invited to policy- and lawmaking conversations to write their own rules with little concern beyond expanding their power and profit. The installation of tech oligarchs into positions of political power was part of a broader dismantling of institutional checks — enabled by a Supreme Court that granted the presidency sweeping immunity and a Congress that declined to exercise its oversight powers — in a year that also saw mass immigration raids, military deployments to US cities, and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean.
Unelected billionaire Elon Musk was given broad authority through DOGE,a gleefully slashing critical government funding while positioning his own companies to reap billions in federal contracts and favorable regulatory treatment.1,2
Footnotes
aThe name itself is telling: DOGE references Dogecoin, a memecoin beloved by Musk. The world’s richest man’s program to dismantle government agencies was done under a branding exercise that amounts to a 12-year-old’s snickering inside joke — one he apparently finds endlessly hilarious. ↩
References
1“Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts”, The New York Times. ↩
2 “Musk’s xAI announces $200 million contract with Pentagon”, Axios. ↩
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