The Billionaires Are Winning

by Rob C.
Art by John Darkow

Donald Trump loves to talk about “the people.” But let’s be clear: the only people he cares about are the ones with private jets, offshore accounts, and their own private islands. While Americans are watching their democracy go up in flames, the billionaires are busy strip-mining the country for parts — and Trump is just their useful idiot who thinks he’s king, when really he’s just the court jester of a billionaire aristocracy.

Pandemic Profiteers

Start with the pandemic. For you and me, it was tragedy, sacrifice, and loss. For Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, it was the greatest cash grab in modern history. Bezos added more than $70 billion to his fortune while Amazon warehouse workers literally passed out on the job. He used his pandemic payday to launch himself into space — not to find a cure for cancer, not to feed the hungry, but to cosplay as a cowboy astronaut.

Elon Musk? He played pandemic roulette with workers’ lives at Tesla factories, while cashing in on government subsidies. Then, with his new mountain of wealth, he bought Twitter, rebranded it as “X,” and turned it into a toxic sinkhole for conspiracy theories, Nazis, and his own fragile ego.

Zuckerberg sat in his Palo Alto compound watching Facebook supercharge COVID disinformation and election lies that helped Trump climb back into power While hospitals overflowed and the world mourned, he played hero in his metaverse — because when you have billions, reality is optional. While ordinary people struggled to stay connected, his algorithm made us more disconnected than ever.

These men don’t just hoard wealth. They hoard power. They see governments as obstacles, not partners. Which is why, in Trump, they saw opportunity.

The Techno-Fascist Architect

Enter Peter Thiel — the father of techno-fascism and the proud founding member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” — the closest thing America has to a real-life Bond villain. A Silicon Valley billionaire who openly says he doesn’t believe in democracy. What does he want instead? He dreams of techno-authoritarian enclaves where billionaires rule, where elections are optional and wealth decides policy. He spent years bankrolling puppet politicians like J.D. Vance, and funneling cash into schemes like Project 2025 — the playbook for turning America into a billionaire-owned fiefdom.

And he’s been investing heavily in that future. He helped bankrolled Trump’s campaign in 2016. He seeded far-right Senate candidates like J.D. Vance. He funneled millions into think tanks and dark-money groups cooking up Project 2025 — the radical blueprint to dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with a billionaire-run fiefdom.

Thiel is proof that Trump’s rise wasn’t an accident. It was engineered.

The Dark Money Royals

Of course, no coup is complete without old money pulling the strings. Enter Robert and Rebekah Mercer — hedge-fund billionaires who think taxes are theft and democracy is a nuisance. They practically bought Trump’s first White House run. The Mercers pumped nearly $20 million into Donors Trust, the right’s favorite “dark money laundromat”. From there, the cash funded Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and the army of trolls, bots, and propagandists who flooded American screens in 2016. They installed Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the army of “alternative facts” that turned disinformation into policy.

Their return on investment? A seat at the table, where they installed their personal lackeys —

Without the Mercers, Trump is just a bankrupt casino mogul with a spray tan. With their money, he’s their weapon.

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A Long Game of Lies

None of this is new. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explained in The Big Myth, corporate America has spent a century selling the lie that billionaires are the “job creators”, the government is the problem, and the market will save us all. It’s propaganda that built the Reagan era, gutting public institutions while claiming trickle-down economics would lift us all, and paved the road for Trump. The myth lived on through deregulation, privatization, and billionaire tax cuts. It’s a bedtime story for oligarchs, designed to lull the public into handing them the keys to the kingdom.

In my own book, Democracy for Sale, I showed how this myth morphed into dark-money networks, billionaire think tanks, and corporate-funded “astro-turf” groups. Now we’re seeing the final act: billionaires don’t just want influence — they want ownership. Now they’re writing the laws, funding the judges, and installed a president who will do their bidding while tweeting like a madman. The billionaires have been playing this long game for decades — Trump is just their noisy frontman.

The Burning of the Republic

So here we are in 2025. The payoff is here. Trump’s administration is burning down the government to clear the way for techno-fascist rule. Regulations that protect workers, the environment, or public health are being tossed into the fire. Billionaires don’t see themselves as part of society — they see themselves as above it. And Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed dictator, is happily doing their bidding in exchange for his cut of the spoils.

Trump’s second term looks less like governance and more like a yard sale of the public good. Public education – Starved. Medicaid – Slashed. Civil Rights – Torched. And this isn’t incompetence. It’s demolition by design. Burn it all down, so the techno-fascists can rule over the ashes. A government weak enough to fail ordinary people is a government pliable enough to serve billionaires.

The message is clear: the billionaires are winning.

Bezos, Musk, Thiel, the Mercers — they’re not competing with each other, they’re collaborating. It’s one oligarchic club, and you’re not in it.

The Billionaire Mindset

Here’s the scariest part: billionaires like these don’t see themselves as citizens. They see themselves as gods. They don’t believe in a public good because they don’t think the public matters. They’re outside of society, above the rules, untouchable by laws.

Donald Trump is their mascot in a red tie. He plays king while they write the decrees. He thinks he’s using them, but in reality, they’re the ones scripting his every move.

As Democracy Gasps for Air, a Dire Warning:

When billionaires win, everyone else loses. Public services collapse. Civil rights evaporate. The safety net frays until there’s nothing left but rubble. What emerges isn’t democracy — it’s a corporate colony, run for profit and policed by the military.

So yes, it’s funny to mock Elon Musk tweeting like a drunk teenager or Bezos strutting around in a space cowboy outfit. But don’t let the specticle distract you. This is a hostile takeover of the American experiment.

We can still stop it — but only if we see it for what it is. The billionaires are winning. And if we don’t fight back, they won’t just win the game — they’ll own the board.