Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, just used his political influence to shut down a bipartisan deal to keep the government open. It’s obscene — but it’s just one example of the ways billionaires dominate American democracy.

During the first Republican debate in 2015, Donald Trump positioned himself as a bold truth-teller, almost a whistleblower, about the corrupt influence he’d exercised on politicians as a wealthy donor. The moderators asked why he’d given money to Democrats in the past, and he replied:

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

As Andrew Prokop dryly noted at the time, it was an unusual pitch. “Reformers usually present themselves as blameless.” Trump, instead, almost sounded like he was bragging. He presented himself as someone who’d played the system himself, knew it inside and out, and could thus be clear-eyed about what needed to be fixed.

Nine years later, Trump is preparing to start his second term as president. And one of his closest associates (and by far his most important political donor), billionaire Elon Musk, just used his wealth to influence the political process in a far more flagrant way than anything Trump was talking about on that debate stage in 2015.

Musk bought the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X) for $44 billion dollars in 2022. There’s every reason to suspect that he’s manipulated the site’s algorithm to boost his own posts. However that may be, he’s Twitter/X’s most popular user, with 207.9 million followers. Even the president-elect only has 96.2 million. Starting in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he used that megaphone to post 150 times about his opposition to a bipartisan spending deal intended to stop the government from shutting down just before Christmas.

During the election, Musk spent well over $200 million on two pro-Trump PACs, making him by far the highest-spending donor on either side of the race. He was rewarded with such a prominent place by Trump’s side that a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that Musk rather than J. D. Vance was Trump’s running mate. The combination of the close association he bought with the president-elect and his prominence on the social media platform he had purchased would be enough, all on its own, for Musk’s noisy opposition to the spending deal to turn the heads of many Republican lawmakers. Not content with this level of influence, though, Musk used his day of rage-posting to publicly threaten that he would personally finance a primary challenge against any Republican congressman who voted for the deal.

When Money Talks

That’s not a threat any Republican with an instinct for political preservation would take lightly. Musk is the world’s richest man, with a reported net worth of $455 billion. To put that into perspective, it’s more than sixty-nine times Trump’s own estimated worth of $6.61 billion. Musk could finance a lot of primary challenges before he would feel his wallet getting lighter.

The combination of this threat, and a desire to be seen as siding with a figure who has bought himself prestige with Trump’s base, was enough to kill a spending deal that the Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, had spent months negotiating with Democrats. It’s now unclear whether a shutdown can be averted at all. Don’t be surprised if many federal employees end up having to spend a month working without pay like they did in 2018, or if Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — i.e., food stamps — grind to a halt. Even if that outcome is averted, though, this was a remarkably blatant way for a billionaire to flex his political muscles, and it should deeply bother anyone who takes democracy seriously.

Allowing billionaires to exist in the first place is absurd. A million and a billion are both amounts of money that greatly exceed what most of us can ever hope to have in our bank accounts, so it’s easy to forget the enormity of the difference. But to put this into perspective, if we imagine a long-lived being (perhaps a vampire) who came to the western hemisphere with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow managed to earn and save the equivalent of a thousand contemporary US dollars every day since he arrived, the vampire would have $1 million by sometime in 1495. He wouldn’t even be a fifth of the way to $1 billion dollars in 2024.

It’s hard to stretch your mind to even imagine how much money $455 billion is. As a matter of distributive justice, letting one man have that much while others struggle to make rent or afford groceries is an abomination. But when we combine that kind of wealth with letting billionaires buy political influence, the consequences for anything resembling meaningful democracy are grim.

A Bipartisan Plutocracy

The problem, however, goes much deeper than Musk himself. The ultrapublic nature of his intervention in the political process made the reality of billionaire rule blindingly obvious, but most of the ways billionaires spend some of their wealth on securing political outcomes are less like that than they are like the process Trump was describing in 2015 — whereby he’d establish relationships with politicians of both parties, and both sides of that relationship would do each other favors. Or like the way Jeff Bezos can influence the political discourse through his ownership of the Washington Post. Or the way anyone rich enough to own businesses that employ lots of people and generate lots of tax revenue can make politicians sweat bullets by threatening to move their operations to a different jurisdiction or overseas.

At this moment, as Musk is rubbing the political power conferred by his wealth in all of our faces, many Democrats may be tempted to make populist hay out of this. That’s a good instinct in the abstract: the talking points write themselves. But Democrats’ own credibility on the issue of billionaire influence is in the gutter. As of the end of October, Forbes estimated that eighty-three billionaires were backing the candidacy of Kamala Harris, compared to only fifty-two for Trump. Of course, given that one of those fifty-two was the man in the world with the most billions, and that he gave more lavishly than any of Kamala’s eighty-three, Trump was still in the better position. But there’s only so much populism you can pull off while cashing checks from eighty-three billionaires.

Of course, many plutocrats prefer to hedge their bets and spread their influence far and wide. They would say what Trump said in 2015. “I give to everyone. When they call, I give!” As long as politicians of both parties keep making phone calls to the ultrarich, rule-by-billionaire in the United States will continue.