President Donald Trump was sworn into office at the U.S. Capitol rotunda on Monday in an unusually quiet affair for a presidential inauguration. Gone were the roaring crowds of years past, which had reached into the millions at their height. In their place was a small inner circle of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the nation’s history, who alone got to witness the transfer of power.

While wealth and power have never been out of place at an inauguration, the sheer concentration of it stood out on Monday. In one row alone sat Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (with a reported net worth of $211.8 billion), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($239.4 billion), Tesla’s Elon Musk ($433.9 billion) and Apple’s Tim Cook ($2.2 billion). By means of comparison, the combined net worth of the lower half of the American population is just under $4 trillion; the........

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