America needs a movement to curb billionaires' power [View all]

Steven Greenhouse

Not a day goes by without some news about billionaires throwing their weight around to bend the system in their favor or about politicians giving them tax cuts, government contracts or pardons. In today’s new Gilded Age, the 900-plus billionaires in the US have far too much influence over our elections, our economy, our government policies and our news media, and it’s urgent for Americans to create a movement to curb their power in order to preserve what’s left of our democracy and assure we have an economy with some basic fairness.

It’s deeply troubling that billionaires have far more power in shaping our nation’s politics and policies than do average Americans, whether they’re auto workers, teachers, nurses, carpenters or supermarket cashiers. What’s more, it’s deeply disturbing that so many billionaires support the most authoritarian president in US history, whether by donating to his campaign or his gilded ballroom.

Eleven billionaires with a combined worth of $1.35tn attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration or surrounding events. Skydance – a company controlled by David Ellison and backed by his father Larry Ellison, the world’s sixth-richest person – just clinched a $110bn deal to buy Warner Brothers, and they’ll no doubt make Warner-owned CNN far friendlier toward Trump, just as they have done with CBS News.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta plans to spend $65m on this year’s political campaigns to elect candidates who share his aversion to regulating the AI industry. Matthew Moroun, who owns the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Canada, donated $1m to a Maga group, and soon after Trump threatened to block the opening of a competing bridge that Canada paid more than $4bn to build. Crypto billionaires plan to spend millions to defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown in this year’s Senate race in Ohio, hoping for a replay of 2024, when crypto’s $40m in donations were key to unseating Brown, a critic of crypto and long the Senate’s most ardent champion of the working class.

Rupert Murdoch and other billionaire media barons have pushed the political conversation to the right. Elon Musk turned Twitter into a far-right, often-racist echo chamber after he purchased it for $44bn, while Jeff Bezos has made the Washington Post far friendlier to Trump, blocking its endorsement of Kamala Harris and moving its editorial page sharply to the right. Spearheading an anti-union push, Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Amazon have even sought to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. The labor board oversees unionization elections and cracks down on corporations’ illegal anti-union activities.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/15/billionaire-curb-power-movement

Absolutely!