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Oligarchs and Strongmen: the Difference and Why It Matters
Trump is both a master oligarch and a strongman; his ruthlessness and that of other oligarchs in his orbit reflect in part a self-confidence founded on their wealth.
Jan 26, 2025
Since we published The Oligarchs’ Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power in 2023, the question we get asked most often is: What’s the difference between an oligarch and a strongman? Instead of strongmen, some interlocutors use adjacent words like autocrat, authoritarian, dictator, or tyrant. That question is of great relevance now that Donald Trump has become the 47th U.S. president.
In part, the question reflects confusion about what an oligarch is. To paraphrase Aristotle, oligarchs are the wealthy few who govern us. Or, to put it slightly more formally, oligarchs secure and reproduce wealth and power, then use one to acquire the other. The key word in these definitions is wealth.
Oligarchs acquire their wealth in three ways. They can be self-made through entrepreneurial ventures, such as Elon Musk. They can inherit their wealth, such as Tung Chee-hwa did. Or they can use their connections to generate wealth. Vladimir Putin is a good example. Trump’s wealth came from all three sources.
All of these oligarchs have options, no matter how things work out for them. Their wealth is the ultimate insurance policy.
Oligarchs also possess three types of power. The power generated from holding a decision-making role, such as head of state or government. The power to set agendas through media ownership or political campaign contributions. Or the power to shape the way we think and act, as Google has done so effectively. Trump’s power comes from all three types.
Strongmen focus on the consolidation and centralization of decision-making power. They have little or no accountability. They control key institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, military, and the media. They suppress dissent. They often rely on a personality cult. They also seek to remain in power for long periods. Note the key word here: power.
Simply put, oligarchs have two mechanisms of control: wealth and power. Strongmen have only one: power. And this matters a lot in the era of growing uncertainty in which we live. Think of it this way. Oligarchs have diversified their resources across two control mechanisms, much as we diversify our investment portfolios. If one resource becomes diminished, oligarchs can fall back on the other.
Thaksin Shinawatra is a good example of why this matters. Deposed as Thailand’s prime minister in a 2005 military coup, Thaksin had sufficient wealth to flee the country and comfortably re-establish himself in exile in Dubai. From there, he continued to help set Thailand’s political agenda, and, after returning this year, caused a change in government favorable to his political party.
Oligarchs and strongmen are different categories of economic and political actors. But the lines between these categories are not always sharp. One way to understand this better is by dividing oligarchs and strongmen into three different categories. We identified 40 oligarchs and strongmen over the period from the 1930s to the present and categorized them this way:
Oligarchs Who Are Strongmen | Oligarchs Who Are Not Strongmen | Strongmen Who Are Not Oligarchs |
Idi Amin | Mohammed bin Laden | Abiy Ahmed |
Mohamed Siad Barre | Isabel Dos Santos | |
Silvio Berlusconi | Mikhail Fridman | Rodrigo Duterte |
Nayib Bukele | Al Gore | Boris Johnson |
Alejandro Char | Rafic Hariri | Jaroslaw Kaczynski |
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan | Charles Koch | Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) |
Francisco Franco Bahamonde | Larry Page | Narendra Modi |
Muammar Gaddafi | Sebastian Piñera | Benito Mussolini |
Adolf Hitler | Cyril Ramaphosa | Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu |
Saddam Hussein | Thaksin Shinawatra | Augusto Pinochet Ugarte |
Mobutu Sese Seko | Tung Chee-hwa | |
Elon Musk | Yulia Tymoshenko | |
Victor Orbán | Asif Ali Zardari | |
Vladimir Putin | ||
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) | ||
Donald Trump | ||
Xi Jinping |
As depicted in the first column, in 42% of these cases, oligarchs are also strongmen, consolidating power and growing more wealthy in sequence or sometimes at the same time. Silvio Berlusconi was an oligarch before becoming Italy’s prime minister three times, using his media ownership to reshape public opinion. Once in office, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, he projected a nationalist cult of virility and mainstreamed the far-right. All while maintaining and growing his wealth. He admired other oligarchs who were strongmen, such as Vladimir Putin.
But, as shown in column two, 32% of the cases involve oligarchs who are NOT strongmen. In some instances, they’re not strongmen, because they don't hold the decision-making power needed to become strongmen. For example, Larry Page and Charles Koch, who have substantial ideological and agenda-setting power, respectively, haven’t served in political office and thus lack the decision-making power needed to become strongmen. Other oligarchs in this category have held decision-making positions, but were constrained from becoming strongmen by their country’s constitutional orders. Rafic Hariri served two terms in office as Lebanon’s prime minister, and his power was limited by its confessional system of political power distribution.
As shown in the third column, 28% of the cases we examined are strongmen who are not oligarchs. They lack the wealth to become one. In some instances, they may not care. For example, AMLO is likely to continue as an important figure in Mexican politics after completing his term in office, regardless of whether he has wealth or not. But, for others, wealth could have made a difference. Mussolini must have dreamed of having the wealth to buy himself out of his ignominious death. Bolsonaro must have wished for the wealth that would make his post-presidency more comforable. Strongmen have incentives to become oligarchs.
Why does the distinction between oligarchs and strongmen matter? We can see why in the new Trump regime that is emerging in the United States. Trump is both a master oligarch and a strongman. His ruthlessness and that of other oligarchs in his orbit reflect in part a self-confidence founded on their wealth. Elon Musk, currently the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth we estimate at $440 billion by Forbes, is one of the most powerful people in Trumpworld now. Timothy Mellon, whose family is worth $14.1 billion, is one of the top contributors to Trump’s campaign. Peter Thiel, worth $15.5 billion, is JD Vance’s benefactor. And of course Trump, worth $6.3B. This is just a partial list.
All of these oligarchs have options, no matter how things work out for them. Their wealth is the ultimate insurance policy. In an uncertain world, two control mechanisms—wealth and power—are always better than one.
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Trump’s Deportation Plans Benefit Billionaires at the Cost of Our Communities
To have the best chance at protecting immigrants in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.
Dec 05, 2024
While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appoints a new “government efficiency” committee and threatens to unleash the military in American cities, he is simultaneously pushing policies that will see billions poured into private security and surveillance companies—including those owned by his biggest campaign benefactors, with little or no accountability.
Armed drones, facial recognition, and robot dogs have become a part of popular culture over the past 20 years, with little attention to the violent impacts they have on both the militarization of communities and in all our daily lives. These dangerous products and technologies have served two functions: They are fear-based marketing tools that helped seed the rhetorical ground for the authoritarian backlash that came to full fruition in this election and they actually make the U.S. southern border region exponentially more dangerous for people living, working, and crossing there.
As veterans, we put our lives on the line so that our communities back home can live safe and secure lives. Trump’s cruel deportation plans and suggestion that the U.S. military be used to carry them out for the benefit of his billionaire friends is not what we signed up for.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Since at least 2001, when the U.S. entered its post-9/11 forever war period and established the “Department of Homeland Security,” a handful of journalists, activists, and migrants have been warning us about the all-too-cozy relationship between weapons manufacturers, tech companies, and the government agencies tasked with immigration enforcement. By 2022, this sprawling border and surveillance industry (BSI) had become a $500 billion business. The U.S. border and immigration enforcement budget under Democratic President Joe Biden exceeded $30 billion this year.
But Americans ain’t seen nothing yet. While this industry, which has used vulnerable populations as a testing ground for over a decade, has been slowly making its way into everyday life, the incoming Trump administration is about to fast track the reach of this violent industry in very intrusive ways into the lives of all Americans as the surveillance industry goes into overdrive.
Trump’s planned enforcement spending will hand billions to his friends in big business. Private prison stocks like Geo Group and CoreCivic nearly doubled in value after he was declared the winner of the November 5 election. This also happened in 2017, when, within a month of Trump taking office, CoreCivic and Geo Group doubled their stocks. The American Immigration Council has put the cost of Trump’s deportation proposals at an estimated $315 billion of taxpayer money, much of which would involve subsidies to industry.
To have the best chance at protecting immigrant communities in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat to our communities: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.
These billionaires, who thrive on spreading fear, have learned to use the government as a personal piggy bank, while continuing to win delays for things like healthcare reform, poverty elimination, and climate action—endangering us all in the process.
Safety and community security are universal human values. As veterans, we understand how important it is to protect our loved ones from danger. We also believe that fighting for the rights of all our communities, and making climate justice a priority, is what will keep us safe and secure through the coming century. But Trumpism has warped our view of security so badly that many Americans now see billionaires as the answer, rather than the diverse working class people who build our factories, plow our fields, and serve our country so nobly, including in the military.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and far-right political donor, controls companies like Palantir, a data company which sells our personal information to militaries around the world, and Anduril, which builds AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border and sells weaponized drones. Google Thiel’s name and you will see a litany of government contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions just in the past year alone, including to the Israeli military for automated targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.
Elon Musk currently holds $3 billion in U.S. government contracts, the bulk of them with NASA and the Department of Defense. Musk took more than $15 billion taxpayer dollars in contracts over the past decade.
We are not going to stand idly by as Trump deportation forces tear our communities apart. The border and surveillance industry, aligned with the dying fossil fuel industry, is intentionally creating a more hostile, insecure environment for all of us just to line their own pockets.
We are going to do what we did in 2016: Roll up our sleeves and get to work. We will rebuild safety and security within our communities by relying on each other to resist the coming federal incursions into our cities and states. We will organize with the migrant justice movement, with climate activists, and with defenders of democracy to protect our neighbors. And we will expose the hell out of the profiteering billionaire enablers of hate in our country.
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It’s Time to Take On the New Cold Warriors of Silicon Valley
We can’t afford to let the people and companies that will profit most from AI’s unbridled military application have the upper hand in making the rules for how it should be used.
Jun 28, 2024
Venture capital and military startup firms in Silicon Valley have begun aggressively selling a version of automated warfare that will deeply incorporate artificial intelligence. Those companies and their CEOs are now pressing full speed ahead with that emerging technology, largely dismissing the risk of malfunctions that could lead to the future slaughter of civilians, not to speak of the possibility of dangerous scenarios of escalation between major military powers. The reasons for this headlong rush include a misplaced faith in “miracle weapons,” but above all else, this surge of support for emerging military technologies is driven by the ultimate rationale of the military-industrial complex: vast sums of money to be made.
The New Techno-Enthusiasts
While some in the military and the Pentagon are indeed concerned about the future risk of AI weaponry, the leadership of the Defense Department is on board fully. Its energetic commitment to emerging technology was first broadcast to the world in an August 2023 speech delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to the National Defense Industrial Association, the largest arms industry trade group in the country. She used the occasion to announce what she termed “the Replicator Initiative,” an umbrella effort to help create “a new state of the art—just as America has before—leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains—which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”
Hicks was anything but shy about pointing to the primary rationale for such a rush toward robotic warfare: outpacing and intimidating China. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC [People’s Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, ‘Today is not the day’—and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond.”
Hick’s supreme confidence in the ability of the Pentagon and American arms makers to wage future techno-wars has been reinforced by a group of new-age militarists in Silicon Valley and beyond, spearheaded by corporate leaders like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
Patriots or Profiteers?
These corporate promoters of a new way of war also view themselves as a new breed of patriots, ready and able to successfully confront the military challenges of the future.
A case in point is “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a lengthy manifesto on Anduril’s blog. It touts the superiority of Silicon Valley startups over old-school military-industrial behemoths like Lockheed Martin in supplying the technology needed to win the wars of the future:
The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who, nevertheless, do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need… These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of defense.
In contrast to the industrial-age approach it critiques, Luckey and his compatriots at Anduril seek an entirely new way of developing and selling weapons:
Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificially intelligent, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds.
At first glance, Luckey seems a distinctly unlikely candidate to have risen so far in the ranks of arms industry executives. He made his initial fortune by creating the Oculus virtual reality device, a novelty item that users can strap to their heads to experience a variety of 3-D scenes (with the sensation that they’re embedded in them). His sartorial tastes run toward sandals and Hawaiian shirts, but he has now fully shifted into military work. In 2017, he founded Anduril, in part with support from Peter Thiel and his investment firm, Founders Fund. Anduril currently makes autonomous drones, automated command and control systems, and other devices meant to accelerate the speed at which military personnel can identify and destroy targets.
Thiel, a mentor to Palmer Luckey, offers an example of how the leaders of the new weapons startup firms differ from the titans of the Cold War era. As a start, he’s all in for Donald Trump. Once upon a time, the heads of major weapons makers like Lockheed Martin tried to keep good ties with both Democrats and Republicans, making substantial campaign contributions to both parties and their candidates and hiring lobbyists with connections on both sides of the aisle. The logic for doing so couldn’t have seemed clearer then. They wanted to cement a bipartisan consensus for spending ever more on the Pentagon, one of the few things most key members of both parties agreed upon. And they also wanted to have particularly good relations with whichever party controlled the White House and/or the Congress at any moment.
The Silicon Valley upstarts and their representatives are also much more vocal in their criticisms of China. They are the coldest (or do I mean hottest?) of the new cold warriors in Washington, employing harsher rhetoric than either the Pentagon or the big contractors. By contrast, the big contractors generally launder their critiques of China and support for wars around the world that have helped pad their bottom lines through think tanks, which they’ve funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.
The approach advocated by Brose and his acolytes is going to make war more likely as technological hubris instills a belief that the United States can indeed “beat” a rival nuclear-armed power like China in a conflict, if only we invest in a nimble new high-tech force.
Thiel’s main company, Palantir, has also been criticized for providing systems that have enabled harsh border crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as “predictive policing.” That (you won’t be surprised to learn) involves the collection of vast amounts of personal data without a warrant, relying on algorithms with built-in racial biases that lead to the systematic unfair targeting and treatment of people of color.
To fully grasp how the Silicon Valley militarists view next-generation warfare, you need to check out the work of Christian Brose, Palantir’s chief strategy officer. He was a long-time military reformer and former aide to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). His book Kill Chainserves as a bible of sorts for advocates of automated warfare. Its key observation: that the winner in combat is the side that can most effectively shorten the “kill chain” (the time between when a target is identified and destroyed). His book assumes that the most likely adversary in the next tech war will indeed be China, and he proceeds to exaggerate Beijing’s military capabilities, while overstating its military ambitions and insisting that outpacing that country in developing emerging military technologies is the only path to future victory.
And mind you, Brose’s vision of shortening that kill chain poses immense risks. As the time to decide what actions to take diminishes, the temptation to take humans “out of the loop” will only grow, leaving life-and-death decisions to machines with no moral compass and vulnerable to catastrophic malfunctions of a sort inherent in any complex software system.
Much of Brose’s critique of the current military-industrial complex rings true. A few big firms are getting rich making ever more vulnerable huge weapons platforms like aircraft carriers and tanks, while the Pentagon spends billions on a vast, costly global basing network that could be replaced with a far smaller, more dispersed military footprint. Sadly, though, his alternative vision poses more problems than it solves.
First, there’s no guarantee that the software-driven systems promoted by Silicon Valley will work as advertised. After all, there’s a long history of “miracle weapons” that failed, from the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to President Ronald Reagan’s disastrous Star Wars missile shield. Even when the ability to find and destroy targets more quickly did indeed improve, wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, fought using those very technologies, were dismal failures.
A recent Wall Street Journalinvestigation suggests that the new generation of military tech is being oversold as well. The Journal found that small top-of-the-line new U.S. drones supplied to Ukraine for its defensive war against Russia have proved far too “glitchy and expensive,” so much so that, irony of ironies, the Ukrainians have opted to buy cheaper, more reliable Chinese drones instead.
Finally, the approach advocated by Brose and his acolytes is going to make war more likely as technological hubris instills a belief that the United States can indeed “beat” a rival nuclear-armed power like China in a conflict, if only we invest in a nimble new high-tech force.
The result, as my colleague Michael Brenes and I pointed out recently, is the untold billions of dollars of private money now pouring into firms seeking to expand the frontiers of techno-war. Estimates range from $6 billion to $33 billion annually and, according to The New York Times, $125 billion over the past four years. Whatever the numbers, the tech sector and its financial backers sense that there are massive amounts of money to be made in next-generation weaponry and aren’t about to let anyone stand in their way.
Meanwhile, an investigation by Eric Lipton of The New York Times found that venture capitalists and startup firms already pushing the pace on AI-driven warfare are also busily hiring ex-military and Pentagon officials to do their bidding. High on that list is former Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Such connections may be driven by patriotic fervor, but a more likely motivation is simply the desire to get rich. As Ellen Lord, former head of acquisition at the Pentagon, noted, “There’s panache now with the ties between the defense community and private equity. But they are also hoping they can cash in big-time and make a ton of money.”
The Philosopher King
Another central figure in the move toward building a high-tech war machine is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. His interests go far beyond the military sphere. He’s become a virtual philosopher king when it comes to how new technology will reshape society and, indeed, what it means to be human. He’s been thinking about such issues for some time and laid out his views in a 2021 book modestly entitled The Age of AI and Our Human Future, coauthored with none other than the late Henry Kissinger. Schmidt is aware of the potential perils of AI, but he’s also at the center of efforts to promote its military applications. Though he forgoes the messianic approach of some up-and-coming Silicon Valley figures, whether his seemingly more thoughtful approach will contribute to the development of a safer, more sensible world of AI weaponry is open to debate.
Let’s start with the most basic thing of all: the degree to which Schmidt thinks that AI will change life as we know it is extraordinary. In that book of his and Kissinger’s, they asserted that it would spark “the alteration of human identity and the human experience at levels not seen since the dawn of the modern age,” arguing that AI’s “functioning portends progress toward the essence of things, progress that philosophers, theologians, and scientists have sought, with partial success, for millennia.”
On the other hand, the government panel on artificial intelligence on which Schmidt served fully acknowledged the risks posed by the military uses of AI. The question remains: Will he, at least, support strong safeguards against its misuse? During his tenure as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board from 2017 to 2020, he did help set the stage for Pentagon guidelines on the use of AI that promised humans would always “be in the loop” in launching next-gen weapons. But as a tech industry critic noted, once the rhetoric is stripped away, the guidelines “don’t really prevent you from doing anything.”
In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other good government advocates questioned whether Schmidt’s role as head of the Defense Innovation Unit didn’t represent a potential conflict of interest. After all, while he was helping shape its guidelines on the military applications of AI, he was also investing in firms that stood to profit from its development and use. His investment entity, America’s Frontier Fund, regularly puts money in military tech startups, and a nonprofit he founded, the Special Competitive Studies Project, describes its mission as to “strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence (AI) [reshapes] our national security, economy, and society.” The group is connected to a who’s who of leaders in the military and the tech industry and is pushing, among other things, for less regulation over military-tech development. In 2023, Schmidt even founded a military drone company, White Stork, which, according to Forbes, has been secretly testing its systems in the Silicon Valley suburb of Menlo Park.
The question now is whether Schmidt can be persuaded to use his considerable influence to rein in the most dangerous uses of AI. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for using it to enhance warfighting capabilities suggests otherwise:
Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes along that changes things. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology—nuclear weapons—that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that [AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that powerful.
Given the risks already cited, comparing militarized AI to the development of nuclear weapons shouldn’t exactly be reassuring. The combination of the two—nuclear weapons controlled by automatic systems with no human intervention—has so far been ruled out, but don’t count on that lasting. It’s still a possibility, absent strong, enforceable safeguards on when and how AI can be used.
AI is coming, and its impact on our lives, whether in war or peace, is likely to stagger the imagination. In that context, one thing is clear: We can’t afford to let the people and companies that will profit most from its unbridled application have the upper hand in making the rules for how it should be used.
Isn’t it time to take on the new-age warriors?
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