Can America’s ‘Self-Made’ Men Make A President? – OpEd

UBS, the giant Swiss private bank, has been tracking newcomers to the ranks of the world’s billionaire class for going on a decade now. The latest annual UBS count of the world’s new billionaires, released last November, announced a bit of history. For the first time ever, UBS noted, more people are now becoming billionaires via inheritance than through their own “entrepreneurship.”

This UBS revelation didn’t attract much public attention. But you can bet that plenty of billionaires noticed. The legitimacy of billionaire fortunes has always rested on the entrepreneurial myth our super rich invoke at every opportunity. Our brilliance, that myth goes, made us our billions. How dare any government make any move to tax away any significant chunk of our “self-made” riches!

The Biden administration has so dared, most notably by proposing a “billionaire’s tax,” a levy that would have the holders of fortunes worth over $100 millionpaying taxesannually on the growth in the value of their financial assets, the bedrock of billionaire wealth.

For the billionaire venture capitalist — and one-time Democrat — Marc Andreessen, that Biden tax proposal would be “the final straw.” Andreessen has since thenjoinedthe pro-Trump ranks.

But more than taxes have been driving high-tech movers and shakers to Trump. America’s tech-related fortunes all “grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment,”notesJohn Naughton, a wealth analyst at the UK’s Open University. But activist regulators like Lina Kahn at the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission have of late beencancelingthe blank checks Big Tech has so enjoyed cashing.

This new Biden-era federal refusal to automatically do Big Tech’s bidding has energized billionaires once content to pay relatively little attention to politics. Elon Musk has come to symbolize that new energy — and stands to gain the most from it. Trump has alreadypromisedto name Musk the head of a new “government efficiency commission” he plans to create once back in the White House.

That perch could easily give Musk the leverage he needs to swat away federal probes into his operations already underway in agencies ranging from theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administrationto theSecurities and Exchange Commission.

Just how much are Donald Trump’s high-tech boosters now funneling into his campaign? We may never know for sure, given our contemporary “dark money” scene. But we do havesome numberson the broader billionaire scene that can help us understand the overall political impact of fortunes built on everything from computer chips to poker chips.

We know, for instance, that billionaire heiress Miriam Adelman, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has deposited $100 million into her Preserve America super PAC. Railroad heir Timothy Mellon has bestowed an even more stunning$150 millionupon his Make America Great Again PAC operation.

Elon Musk — before October — had dumped some $75 million into his America PAC. Just-released filingsshowthat Musk added an additional $44 million into that PAC over the first half of October and another $2.3 million into the pro-Trump Sentinel Action Fund.

What do all those millions buy? Plenty of ad time, of course, on TV and computer screens. But billionaires like Musk aren’t just buying eyeballs. They’re also doing their best to return America to the good old original Gilded Age days when our super rich couldsimply buywhatever votes they needed. Elon Musk has been leading the way to this brazen new vote-buying era.

A little over two weeks before Election Day, Musk — “thequintessentialrobber baron of America’s second Gilded Age” — began running daily lotteries open only to registered swing-state voters who signed a petition in support of free speech and the right to bear arms. The daily prize: $1 million.

Paying people to induce them to vote or get registered,USA Todaypoints out, just happens to be “an offense punishable by prison time,” and that legal prohibition holds for “anything of monetary value like liquor or lottery chances,”holdsa U.S. Justice Department election-crimes manual.

After four daily winners — and a warning from the Justice Department — Musk put his daily lottery prizeon hold. But if he should resume his lottery, the daily million-dollar prizes certainly won’t make much of a dent on Musk’s personal fortune. Musk ended October 23worth$237billion.

Other pro-Trump billionaires, meanwhile, are devoting millions to the dayafterNovember 5. TheWall Street Journalearlier this weekrevealedthat a “secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires” has spent the years since the 2020 presidential election “laying the groundwork for a more organized, better funded and far broader effort to contest the outcome.”

Groups linked to billionaires like the Wisconsin shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Hobby Lobby founder David Green, theJournalreports, “have been scrutinizing voter registrations on an industrial scale and working to slow down the vote count” and “bury local election officials in paperwork and lawsuits.”

To add to the post-election chaos, theJournaladds, one of these billionaire-backed groups is even offering monetary rewards to “anyone reporting election fraud or abuse.”

Another Trump-boosting group, the EagleAI Network, is bombarding election officials with long lists of registered voters that it claims need investigating. These lists, charges Ben Hovland, the chair of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, amount to a “weaponization” of open-records laws, a “resource drain” that has “real-world consequences” for the work of local election offices that administer America’s elections.

We may well end up this election year with a broken election system. Who will deserve the blame? That will ultimately belong to the billionaires who assure us, at every opportunity, that they wish nothing more than to make America great again.