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The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from the politics of hatred and racialism.
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read—no, this is not hyperbole!—like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a 21st-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of—yes!—Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.
Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.
Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
The racist tinge to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of white nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.
On January 31s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).
By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS—power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project—in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.
Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.
Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.
As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.
And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.
The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9%, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3% driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”
This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by white corporate digital power.)
It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.
Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a white settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).
Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination.
Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in white privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories;” held political office in South Africa while it was still an apartheid state; and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in white establishments, and had no right to vote.
In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average white worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its apartheid racial segregation and ruling white nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.
Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population—many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.
What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy white Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.
The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.
It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.
Just like the old Sicilian mafia called itself Cosa Nostra—meaning “our thing”—Trump presents himself as “Our Monster,” a kind of anti-hero who embodies the public’s disgust with a distant and dismissive establishment.
On August 24, 2023, a headline blared “La Maga Nostra” over the front page of the New York Post.
Dominating the layout was a photo of then-ex-President Donald Trump, his chin slightly raised in veiled contempt. The comparison was unmistakable: Trump as Don Corleone, the shadowy figurehead of The Godfather.
An accompanying news box underscored the irony. Trump had been hit with RICO charges, a legal framework famously pioneered by his own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to bring down New York’s mafia families, including the infamous “Teflon Don,” John Gotti.
Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.
The former real estate mogul has long invited comparisons to the mafia. His favorite films include The Godfather and Goodfellas, and his personal style—big pompadour hair, boxy suits, and flashy red ties—reflects that influence.
Michael Cohen once described himself as Trump’s consigliere, akin to Tom Hagen in The Godfather. Former FBI Director James Comey, who spent part of his career investigating organized crime, remarked that Trump’s approach to cultivating loyalty gave him “flashbacks” to his days taking down capos.
Then who could forget Trump’s infamous dig at Chris Cuomo, calling him “Fredo”—a jab that prompted one of the cringiest displays of Italian American male insecurity in decades.
From his “Teflon” ability to evade legal consequences to his swaggering machismo and Joe Pesci-like fragile ego, the affinity is laid bare.
Recent attempts on his life all but cemented Trump’s image as a modern-day mafia man. Whether or not the Post’s editors realized it, they captured the essence of his appeal.
It’s often remarked that unchecked social and economic pain leads to the emergence of “strong men.” In the classic authoritarian model, outlined by thinkers like Theodor Adorno, the disenfranchised turn to leaders who embody defiance, control, and simplicity in the face of chaos.
For millions of Americans mired in debt, struggling to pay rent, and unlikely ever to own a home, calling our society “neo-feudal” hardly feels hyperbolic.
It also tracks with the history of the mafia. The mafia evolved out of feudalism’s wake in southern Italy. As absentee landlords managed vast estates from afar, a vacuum was filled by vicious overseers and middlemen—figures the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia called “parasitic intermediaries.”
Sciascia is widely credited as Italy’s first “anti-mafia” voice, following his 1961 novel The Day of the Owl. He viewed the mafia’s emergence in Sicily, shortly after the country’s unification in 1861, as a metaphor for the modern corruption of power—representing a distorted “ideal” of justice that promises order and protection for society’s have-nots while thriving on internal exploitation.
That this distorted image developed within a historical context marred by colonization and exploitation in Sicily—where peasants often romanticized the mafia and longed for a return to monarchy—pained Sciascia.
Equally, he recognized similar patterns in other contexts.
Trumpism operates in a similar way—not as a rejection of power consolidation, but as its acceleration.
Recent developments in Trump’s second term illustrate how a cartel-like consolidation of power among billionaires is carving out fiefdoms and aligning their interests with Trump’s administration in ways that echo mafia-like dynamics.
Peter Thiel’s role in “disrupting” the establishment sees him pumping money into Trump-friendly candidates and tech ventures that favor the privatization of state functions—a classic power consolidation strategy.
Jared Kushner’s financial deals with Saudi Arabia suggest a patronage model where money secures access and influence. Saudi investments in Silicon Valley, defense, and U.S. real estate could be seen as a geopolitical deal—leveraging Trump’s power for long-term economic control.
Elon Musk’s role, however, may be the most revealing. If Trump is the Don, Musk is shaping up to be his new consigliere, not unlike the old mafia’s lawyer-fixers—except with a global tech empire at his disposal.
His control over X (formerly Twitter) allows him to dictate the flow of political discourse, much like a mafia boss controlling the press. If Cosa Nostra kept power through silence—omertà—Musk ensures loyalty through algorithms, shadowbans, and the subtle privileging of certain voices over others.
Federal deregulation benefiting Musk’s empire (Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink) might reflect the kind of crony capitalism once associated with political machines, but at a planetary scale. Meanwhile, Trump sides with Musk over H-1B visas, even as the MAGA rank and file rebelled, and Musk called them “retarded.”
The direction we are headed in is shocking. But it would be a terrible mistake to view it as aberrant. Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.
His rise exposes a sickening continuity. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton played the game with suit-and-tie professionalism—the neoliberal, financialized version of patronage. Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney did it through defense contracting and old-money oil interests.
Trump now strips this down to its rawest level: outright transactionalism, loyalty oaths, and a government that operates like a family business.
He presents himself as the “honest liar,” exploiting well-founded perceptions of corruption while openly admitting to behaviors that elites deny. His blatant displays of donor back-scratching feel almost refreshing in their vulgar transparency.
Just like the old Sicilian mafia called itself Cosa Nostra—meaning “our thing”—Trump presents himself as “Our Monster,” so to speak; a kind of anti-hero who embodies the public’s disgust with a distant and dismissive establishment.
Like Al Capone, who opened a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Great Depression, he swoops in to get “close” to the people. As a distorted Robin Hood-like figure, he plays up his everyman appeal, toggling between his gilded digs and disaffected base. His diction is street-level, his parlance tabloid. He eats the food (McDonald’s). He speaks the language.
Sciascia wrote about the insidious spread of corruption, describing how “the palm line”—as a symbol of mafia influence—creeps northward from Sicily to Rome.
In America, Trump represents its teleological end. He doesn’t need to resort to brute violence.
His power lies in painting a romanticized picture—MAGA—over a bleak reality—“American Carnage.” In an Italian context, Sciascia dubbed this Sicilianità: the tendency to “decorate” harsh realities and mask corruption with rhetorical flourish. The Democrats tried to do something similar with “Joy.” But it failed.
The one thing that Sciascia hated more than the mafia was fascism. Yet in a sense, he viewed them as codependent. Ultimately, he viewed the mafia’s power as resulting from a “historic failure, the failure of the Centre-Left,” and the ravages of “eternal bourgeoisie fascism”—the inability of elites to distinguish their dream-hoarding interests from the needs of the masses.
Which brings us to Musk—a billionaire who sells himself as a free-thinking outsider while constructing a world where he remains the gatekeeper of discourse itself.
If Trump’s rise was a mafia movie, Musk’s role makes it something else entirely—a Pirandellian farce, in which power’s corruption is so blatant that it becomes surreal.
We are now through the looking glass. And whatever comes next will be even more profane than the system Trump claims to oppose.
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.
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.