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Billionaire Nerds Want to End Democracy

How ultra-wealthy fascists will replace nations with corporate city-states

In his final speech as United States president, Joe Biden warned that Silicon Valley billionaires posed an existential threat to American democracy. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on January 15, 2025, a grim-faced Biden shared his concern about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”

He reminded Americans that, in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had used his own farewell address to emphasize the rise of a “military-industrial complex” with “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, Biden said he was “equally concerned” about an emergent “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

Five days after Biden’s declaration, on January 20, during a speech celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, performed a Nazi salute—twice—while standing behind a lectern affixed with the official seal of the president of the United States.

Later that day, Musk officially took charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a project aimed at dismantling key parts of the federal government from the inside. He tackled the assignment with the sociopathic glee of a schoolboy ripping the wings from a butterfly, recruiting dozens of young men with zero government experience, including one nicknamed “Big Balls,” to serve as henchmen. Musk’s shock troops quickly set about tearing apart the federal bureaucracy. They were aided in this effort by Grok, Musk’s proprietary artificial intelligence chatbot, which his team deployed to sift through sensitive government data.

The US Constitution bars foreign-born individuals from the presidency, but the South Africa–born Musk found a workaround. He spent nearly $300 million (US) to get Trump elected and buy himself a kind of co-presidency. Once deputized, he immediately began purging thousands of federal workers and dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.

The billionaire announced that he was tossing the agency—which provides life-saving aid to the world’s poorest people—“into the woodchipper.” This decision alone is projected to kill up to 14 million people by 2030, many of them children. In February, one month into his tenure at DOGE, Musk celebrated his reign of destruction by waving around a chainsaw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Techno-Fascism Comes to America,” declared The New Yorker less than one week later.

Musk was not the only tech oligarch to find himself in a position of great power under Trump. In 2025, Silicon Valley was all in on Trumpism. Tech giants lavished him with money and support. As his administration carried out a shock-and-awe effort to destroy the pillars of American democracy, the most powerful and prominent figures in tech stood behind him. Even those tech moguls who had expressed opposition to Trump during his first term now learned to love him, while others honoured him by remaining silent.

When inaugural festivities on the National Mall in Washington had to be moved into the Capitol Rotunda due to freezing temperatures, Trump reserved the scarce seats for his new tech billionaire friends. An iconic photo from the ceremony showed Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all seated prominently. Most of them had bent the knee to get there. After Trump won the 2024 election, Zuckerberg dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. Trump deputy Stephen Miller said Zuckerberg wanted “to support the national renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership.”

On January 7, 2025, Zuckerberg announced his decision to dismantle Meta’s fact-checking infrastructure, further enabling the kinds of disinformation and misinformation that had led to the January insurrection. Bezos—owner of the Washington Post—had killed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris a few weeks before the election. Bezos’s Amazon—along with Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft—donated $1 million (US) to Trump’s inaugural fund. So did Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who had once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler. “Watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him,” wrote Altman on X on January 22, explaining his shift. “I’m not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways.”

However, it was another tech billionaire who would emerge as the real power behind the throne: Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and co-founder of........

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