THREE KEY FACTS
- Bill Burr recently criticised billionaires, highlighting their role in societal struggles and political influence.
- Elon Musk’s support of Donald Trump has made him a controversial figure, linked to “tech bros”.
- Billionaires’ influence in politics is growing, raising concerns for some people about democracy and “stealth politics”.
American comedian Bill Burr has made a career out of cutting social commentary.
Recently, he turned his attention to billionaires.
To borrow a well-used Burr line, it was brutal.
“These f***ing billionaires, they should be put down like f***ing rabid dogs,” he said, making headlines around the world in the process.
Once what a celebrity said about the super-rich wouldn’t have made the news. But the re-election of American President Donald Trump has placed them in the spotlight. First, he appointed fat-cat cronies to positions of power, then his sweeping tariffs had billionaires passing judgement on Trump’s policies and commentators speculating on the damage done to personal fortunes.
Burr was more interested in Americans struggling from day to day.
Anyone familiar with his comedy will know the swearing isn’t unusual and that, while he doesn’t expect such comments to be taken literally, he doesn’t hold back. Men, women, the left, the right, few topics are off-limits. He once said people who go barefoot to the toilet in a plane should be eliminated.
Speaking on an episode of his Monday Morning podcast, he wasn’t looking for laughs. Nor was he criticising the super-rich for their wealth alone. He felt they were causing other people’s suffering and playing politics in the process. Responding to a letter from a fan who said she was a mum who was struggling financially, Burr said, “The amount of people struggling out there because of these f***ing billionaires, and they got us all arguing liberal and conservative.”
Could it be that billionaires are getting a bad name?
There are a record number of them in the world - 3028 US-dollar globally and four in New Zealand this year according to Forbes — and whether or not you celebrate such levels of wealth, they are definitely playing a more prominent role in world politics, and many would say for the wrong reasons.
Trump has made much of his own worth and has surrounded himself by the super-rich.
But it is his embrace of Elon Musk, the Tesla-building, tunnel-digging Mars-obsessed owner of the social media company X (formerly Twitter), that stands out as an example of a new ruling class, where political clout is predicated on one’s personal fortune.
Musk, who reportedly spent US$277 million ($482m) on propping up Trump and groups that supported him in the lead-up to last year’s election, has become the face of widespread federal cost-cutting at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), and seems to be a casual presence at the White House, in his T-shirt, trench coat and trucker cap, often with his young son in tow.
Musk was long seen as an eccentric innovator, a sort of tech-world maverick who was so prepared to push boundaries that he could be forgiven for his unorthodox behaviour and occasional outbursts. But his support of Trump, promotion of conspiracy theories, and right-wing antics — notably Nazi-style salutes — have made him a target of protest and ridicule.
Tesla cars have been vandalised in New Zealand and overseas, often with graffiti featuring swastikas or references to fascism.
Musk’s views don’t represent those of all billionaires, of course. In fact, researchers say most are so private it’s hard to know what they think.
Instead, Musk has become a sort of figurehead for a new breed of super-rich, often referred to as the “tech bros”. A play on the term “Bernie bros”, used as a derogatory way of describing the male supporters of the 2016 and 2020 US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the tech bros are super-rich, powerful men who have made their money in the tech sector and were seen as supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The image of Musk, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg standing together at Trump’s inauguration in January captured the collective power of such men.
And with great power comes great freedom to act in ways that are seen to influence public opinion and online discourse.
Google can track people’s online activities, Facebook has helped decide what content its users consume, and after Musk took over Twitter in 2022, the site eliminated rules banning hate speech and disinformation, and alienated users and advertisers in the process.
Bezos, meanwhile, has sought to influence what opinions Washington Post readers will be exposed to.
In an evolving environment, news organisations around the world often defend the independence of their operations, saying corporate ownership has little to no impact on how they cover news and events.
But Bezos has shown he’s not happy to take a hands-off approach. In what was interpreted as a nod to Trump’s 2024 campaign, the Post announced in October that it wouldn’t endorse a candidate in November’s election. The move led to a mass of subscription cancellations but Bezos defended the move in an opinion piece on the Post’s website, saying endorsements just “create a perception of bias”.
Then in February, he limited the range of voices in the Post’s opinion section to those that defend personal liberties and the free market.
More readers cancelled their subscriptions and the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, joined others in resigning. Columnist of four decades Ruth Marcus did the same in March after the paper refused to publish a piece critical of Bezos’ intervention. That followed the resignation in January of long-time editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit after the Post refused to run her illustration of Bezos and other billionaires kneeling with bags of money before a statue of Trump.
Explaining her decision to resign, Telnaes wrote that owners of press organisations “are responsible for safeguarding” the free press and that “trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press”.
The developments have led to an online free-for-all, with people poking fun at the paper’s official slogan, “Democracy Dies In Darkness”, launched in 2017 after Trump took office the first time, a phrase the Post said was coined by legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward in a 2007 piece he wrote about government secrecy.
It is arguable whether democracy is dying, but could it be morphing into something different?
American political theorist Sheldon Wolin suggested in his 2003 book Democracy Inc that the US was sliding “imperceptibly” towards a hybrid political system he called “inverted totalitarianism”, in which a disengaged public went about their lives as corporate powers increasingly took a greater role in political decision-making. Wolin, who was a professor of politics at Princeton University, was careful to point out he was not describing the rise of a typical totalitarian state such as Nazi Germany, but one in which “economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled”.
Wolin wrote that “the United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed”.
Trump might deserve a chapter all of his own, although leading economists doubt he understands what he is doing.
If he does, economic upheaval would appear to be part of the plan.
In the lead-up to last year’s US election, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges pointed out that both the Deomcrats and Republicans had billionaire backers - Kamala Harris more than Trump — but that what set the parties apart was the type of power they espoused. The Democrats was the party of corporate power, he wrote, and that required stability, predictability and a technocratic government. Trump’s Republicans, on the other hand, were all about oligarchic power, an opportunistic monster that creates and feeds on chaos.
Under this interpretation, chaos isn’t the unforeseen consequence of bad decision-making but, as George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison write in their book The Invisible Doctrine, “the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the billionaires thrive”.
In his farewell speech to the American people in January, President Joe Biden, who had his fair share of big-time backers, warned, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom.”
That may be so. Or is it just that the way extreme wealth, power and influence are being used is becoming more obvious?
Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued in 2014 that the US was already an oligarchy, citing the influence on policy of large businesses and a small group of wealthy citizens.
But that influence has generally operated in the shadows.
In the 2019 book Billionaires and Stealth Politics, Page and fellow academics Jason Seawright and Matthew Lacombe set out to understand as much as they could about the ways the 100 wealthiest billionaires influenced American politics over a 10-year period. They used what they refer to as a “web-scraping and public records” approach to analyse publicly available data on contributions to campaigns and causes and coined the term “stealth politics” to describe what they discovered.
The overall picture the authors paint is of a largely secretive group who often operate out of the spotlight. In general, they are economically conservative — in favour of lower taxes and reduced social spending — and often socially liberal — in favour of causes such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
Bezos, for example, donated US$2.5 million ($4.37m) to same-sex marriage supporters in 2012, and in 2017 received the Human Rights Campaign National Equality Award, the same year Amazon was reported to have paid nothing in federal taxes while facing scrutiny over worker conditions.
One of the most common arguments in favour of billionaire business owners like Bezos and Musk is that they take risks and drive economic growth. That without them, progress would grind to a standstill and that their wealth is dependent on the success of their companies.
Indeed, the world’s 20 richest individuals saw their net worth take a hit in the first few months of the year, some reportedly falling by tens of billions of dollars, and the pain has continued with the introduction of Trump’s tariffs.
Still, online news outlets are discussing who is likely to be the planet’s first trillionaire, expected to be named as soon as 2027. Top of the list? Elon Musk.
Duncan Gillies is a news editor at NZME.