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peter thiel
Under Trump, War Profiteers Are Entering a New Golden Age
The "garrison state" Eisenhower warned of has arrived, with negative consequences for nearly everyone but giant weapons conglomerates and their competitors in the emerging military-tech sector.
Jul 28, 2025
When, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence wielded by a partnership between the military and a growing cohort of U.S. weapons contractors and came up with the ominous term “military-industrial complex,” he could never have imagined quite how large and powerful that complex would become. In fact, in recent years, one firm — Lockheed Martin — has normally gotten more Pentagon funding than the entire U.S. State Department. And mind you, that was before the Trump administration moved to sharply slash spending on diplomacy and jack up the Pentagon budget to an astonishing $1 trillion per year.
In a new study issued by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, Stephen Semler and I lay out just how powerful those arms makers and their allies have become, as Pentagon budgets simply never stop rising. And consider this: in the five years from 2020 to 2024, 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending went to private firms and $791 billion went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). And mind you, that was before Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget bill landed on planet Earth, drastically slashing spending on diplomacy and domestic programs to make room for major tax cuts and near-record Pentagon outlays.
In short, the “garrison state” Eisenhower warned of has arrived, with negative consequences for nearly everyone but the executives and shareholders of those giant weapons conglomerates and their competitors in the emerging military tech sector who are now hot on their trail. High-tech militarists like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey of Anduril have promised a new, more affordable, more nimble, and supposedly more effective version of the military-industrial complex, as set out in Anduril’s “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” an ode to the supposed value of those emerging tech firms.
Curiously enough, that Anduril essay is actually a remarkably apt critique of the Big Five contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon, pointing out their unswerving penchant for cost overruns, delays in scheduling, and pork-barrel politics to preserve weapons systems that all too often no longer serve any useful military purpose. That document goes on to say that, while the Lockheed Martins of the world served a useful function in the ancient days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, today they are incapable of building the next-generation of weaponry. The reason: their archaic business model and their inability to master the software at the heart of a coming new generation of semi-autonomous, pilotless weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing. For their part, the new titans of tech boldly claim that they can provide exactly such a futuristic generation of weaponry far more effectively and at far less cost, and that their weapons systems will preserve or even extend American global military dominance into the distant future by outpacing China in the development of next-generation technologies.
War and a Possible Coming Techno-Autocracy
Could there indeed be a new, improved military-industrial complex just waiting in the wings, one aligned with this country’s actual defense needs that doesn’t gouge taxpayers in the process?
Don’t count on it, not at least if it’s premised on the development of “miracle weapons” that will cost so much less and do so much more than current systems. Such a notion, it seems, arises in every generation, only to routinely fall flat. From the “electronic battlefield” that was supposed to pinpoint and destroy Viet Cong forces in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War years to Ronald Reagan’s failed vision of an impenetrable “Star Wars” missile shield, to the failure of precision-guided munitions and networked warfare to bring victory in Iraq and Afghanistan during this country’s Global War on Terror, the notion that superior military technology is the key to winning America’s wars and expanding U.S. power and influence has been routinely marked by failure. And that’s been true even if the weapons work as advertised (which all too often they don’t).
And while you’re at it, don’t forget, for example, that, nearly 30 years later, the highly touted, high-tech F-35 combat aircraft — once hailed as a technological marvel-in-the-making that would usher in a revolution in both warfare and military procurement — still isn’t ready for prime time. Designed for multiple war-fighting tasks, including winning aerial dogfights, supporting troops on the ground, and bombing enemy targets, the F-35 has turned out to be able to do none of those things particularly well. And to add insult to injury, the plane is so complex that it spends almost as much time being maintained or repaired as being ready to do battle.
That history of technological hubris and strategic failure should be kept in mind when listening to the — so far unproven — claims of the leaders of this country’s military-tech sector about the value of their latest gadgets. For one thing, everything they propose to build — from swarms of drones to unpiloted aircraft, land vehicles, and ships — will rely on extremely complex software that is bound to fail somewhere along the way. And even if, by some miracle, their systems, including artificial intelligence, work as advertised, they may not only not prove decisive in the wars of the future but make wars of aggression that much more likely. After all, countries that master new technologies are tempted to go on the attack, putting fewer of their own people at immediate risk while doing devastating harm to targeted populations. The use of Palantir’s technology by the Israeli Defense Forces to increase the number of targets devastated in a given time frame in their campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza could foreshadow the new age of warfare if emerging military technologies aren’t brought under some system of control and accountability.
A further risk posed by AI-driven warfare is the possibility that the new weapons could choose their targets without human intervention. Current Pentagon policy promises to keep a human “in the loop” in the use of such systems, but military logic runs counter to such claims. As Anduril President and Chief Strategy Officer Christian Brose has written in his seminal book Kill Chain, the high-tech wars of the future will hinge on which side can identify and destroy its targets most quickly — an imperative that would ensure slow-moving humans were left out of the process.
In short, two possibilities arise if the U.S. military transitions to the “new improved” military-industrial complex espoused by the denizens of Silicon Valley: complex systems that don’t perform as advertised, or new capabilities that may make war both more likely and more deadly. And such dystopian outcomes will only be reinforced by the ideology of the new Silicon Valley militarists. They see themselves as both the “founders” of a new form of warfare and “the new patriots” poised to restore American greatness without the need for a democratic government in the war-making mix. Their ideal, in fact, would be to ensure that the government got out of the way and let them solve the myriad problems we face alone. Ayn Rand would be proud.
Such a techno-autocracy would be far more likely to serve the interests of a relatively small elite than aid the average American in any way. From Peter Thiel’s quest for a way to live forever to Elon Musk’s desire to enable the mass colonization of space, it’s not at all clear that, if such goals could even be achieved, they would be generally available. It’s more likely that such opportunities would be restricted to the species of superior beings that the techno-militarists see themselves as being.
The Ultimate Brawl Between the Big Five and the Emerging Tech Firms?
Still, the techno-militarists face serious obstacles in their quest to reach the top rungs of power and influence, not least among them, the continued clout of old-school weapons makers. After all, they still receive the vast bulk of Pentagon weapons spending, based in part on their millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign expenditures and their ability to spread jobs to almost every state and district in the country. These tools of influence give the Big Five far deeper roots in and influence over Congress than the new tech firms. These large, legacy companies also influence government policy through their funding of hawkish think tanks that help shape government policies designed to regulate their conduct, and so much more.
Of course, one way to prevent the ultimate brawl between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms would be to feed them both with ample funding — but that would require a Pentagon budget that would soar well beyond the present trillion-dollar mark. There are, of course, some projects that could benefit both factions, ranging from Donald Trump’s pet Golden Dome missile defense scheme, which could incorporate hardware from the Big Five with software from the emerging tech firms, to Boeing’s new F-47 combat aircraft program, which calls for unpiloted “wing men” likely to be produced by Anduril or another military tech firm. So, the question of confrontation versus cooperation between the new and old guard in the military sector has yet to be settled. If the rival firms end up turning their lobbying resources against each other and going for each other’s proverbial throats, it could weaken their grip on the rest of us and perhaps reveal useful information that might undermine the authority and credibility of both sides.
But count on one thing: neither sector has the best interests of the public in mind, so we need to prepare to fight back ourselves regardless of how their battle plays out.
Okay, then, what could we possibly do to head off the nightmare scenario of a world run by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and crew? First, we’ll need the kind of “alert and knowledgeable” citizenry that Dwight D. Eisenhower pointed to so long ago as the only antidote to an ever more militarized society. That would mean concerted efforts by both the public and the government (which would, of course, have to be run by someone unlike Donald J. Trump — already a project in itself!).
At the moment, the tech sector is indeed increasingly embedded in the Trump administration and he owes a number of them a distinct debt of gratitude for helping him over the top in the 2024 election. Despite his very public and bitter falling out with fellow narcissist Elon Musk, the influence of the tech sector within his administration remains all too strong, starting with Vice President J.D. Vance, who owes his career to the employment, mentoring, and financial support of Silicon Valley militarist Peter Thiel. And don’t forget that a substantial cohort of former employees of Palantir and Anduril have already been given key posts in this administration.
Creating a counterweight to those new-age militarists will require a full-scale societal effort, including educators, scientists, and technologists, the labor movement, non-tech business leaders, and activists of all stripes. Silicon Valley workers did, in fact, organize a number of protests against the militarization of their handiwork before being beaten back. Now, a new wave of such activism is all too desperately needed.
Just as many of the scientists who helped build the atomic bomb spent their post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki lives trying to rein in or abolish nuclear weapons, a cohort of scientists and engineers in the tech sector needs to play a leading role in beginning to craft guardrails to limit the military uses of the technologies they helped develop. Meanwhile, the student movement against the use of U.S. weapons in Gaza has begun to expand its horizons to target the militarization of universities writ large. In addition, environmentalists need to double down on criticisms of the immense energy requirements needed to power AI and crypto, while labor leaders need to reckon with the consequences of AI destroying jobs in the military and civilian sectors alike. And all of this has to happen in the context of a far greater technological literacy, including among congressional representatives and workers in government agencies charged with regulating the suppliers of new military technologies.
None of that is, of course, likely to happen except in the context of a resurgence of democracy and a committed effort to fulfill the unmet rhetorical promises that undergird the myth of the American dream. And speaking of contexts, here’s one that anybody preparing to protest the further militarization of this society should take into account: contrary to the belief of many key figures from the Pentagon to Wall Street to Main Street, the peak of American military and economic power has indeed passed, never to return. The only rational course is to craft policies that maintain American influence in the context of a world where power has been defused and cooperation is all too essential.
Such a view, of course, is the polar opposite of the bombastic, bullying approach of the Trump administration, which, if it persists, will only accelerate American decline. And in that context, the key question is whether the widespread harm inherent in the new budget bill — which will only continue to wildly enrich the Pentagon and big arms firms of both kinds, while hitting the rest of us across the political spectrum — could prompt a new surge of public engagement and a genuine debate about what kind of world we want to live in and how this country could play a constructive (rather than destructive) role in bringing it about.
Big Brother Trump Is Watching You
The second Trump administration is deploying new surveillance methods it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.
Jun 28, 2025
Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.
But before I could make the call, my phone rang.
“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.
“Mary! I was just about to call you.”
“But you did call me,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”
It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they’d followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They’d have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company’s central office.
Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what’s legally possible in Donald Trump’s United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.
All the President’s Tech
Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way.
If you watch police procedurals on television (which I admit to doing more than is probably good for me), you’ll see a panoply of surveillance methods on display, in addition to cellular location data. It used to be only on British shows that the police could routinely rely on video recordings as aids in crime solving. For some decades, the Brits were ahead of us in creating a surveillance society. Nowadays, though, even the detectives on U.S. shows like Law and Order SVU (heading for its 27th season) can usually locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.
Facial recognition is another technology you’ll see on police dramas these days. It’s usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish—a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: “MATCH.”
We should probably live as if everything we do, even in supposedly “secure” places (real and virtual), is visible to the Trump regime.
I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it’s already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser. As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has “compiled a massive biometric database” containing “billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users.” The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.
The old-fashioned art of tailing suspects on foot is rapidly giving way to surveillance by drone, while a multitude of cameras at intersections capture vehicle license plates. Fingerprinting has been around for well over a century, although it doesn’t actually work on everyone. Old people tend to lose the ridges that identify our unique prints, which explains why I can’t reliably use mine to open my phone or wake my computer. Maybe now’s my moment to embark on a life of crime? Probably not, though, as my face is still pretty recognizable, and that’s what the Transportation Safety Administration uses to make sure I’m really the person in the photo on my Real ID.
The second Trump administration is deploying all of these surveillance methods and more, as it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.
One Database to Rule Them All
It’s been thoroughly demonstrated that, despite its name, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been anything but efficient in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending. DOGE, however, has made significantly more progress in achieving a less well publicized but equally important objective: assembling into a single federal database the personal details of hundreds of millions of individuals who have contact with the government. Such a database would combine information from multiple agencies, including the IRS and the Social Security Administration. The process formally began in March 2025 when, as The New York Times reported, President Trump signed an executive order “calling for the federal government to share data across agencies.” Such a move, as Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik note, raises “questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
In keeping with the fiction that DOGE’s work is primarily focused on cost cutting, Trump labeled his order “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” That fiction provided the pretext for DOGE’s demands that agency after agency grant its minions free access to the most private data they had on citizens and noncitizens alike. As The Washington Post reported in early May:
The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.
Worse yet, it will probably be impossible to follow DOGE’s trail of technological mayhem. As the Post reporters explain:
The current administration and DOGE are bypassing many normal data-sharing processes, according to staffers across 10 federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. For instance, many agencies are no longer creating records of who accessed or changed information while granting some individuals broader authority over computer systems. DOGE staffers can add new accounts and disable automated tracking logs at several Cabinet departments, employees said. Officials who objected were fired, placed on leave or sidelined.
My own union, the American Federation of Teachers, joined a suit to prevent DOGE from seizing access to Social Security data and won in a series of lower courts. However, on May 31, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court (with the three liberal judges dissenting) temporarily lifted the block imposed by the lower courts until the case comes back to the justices for a decision on its merits. In the meantime, DOGE can have what it wants from the Social Security Administration. And even if the Supreme Court were ultimately to rule against DOGE, the damage will be done. As the president of El Salvador said in response to an entirely different court ruling, “Oopsie. Too late.”
Musk’s Pal Peter Thiel—and Palantir
Anyone who’s ever worked with a database, even one with only a few thousand records, knows how hard it is to keep it organized and clean. There’s the problem of duplicate records (multiple versions of the same person or other items). And that’s nothing compared to the problem of combining information from multiple sources. Even the names of the places where data goes (“fields”) will differ from one base to another. The very structures of the databases and how records are linked together (“relationships”) will differ, too. All of this makes combining and maintaining databases a messy and confusing business. Now imagine trying to combine dozens of idiosyncratically constructed ones with information stretching back decades into one single, clean, useful repository of information. It’s a daunting project.
And in the case of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Database, that’s where Peter Thiel’s company Palantir comes in. As The New York Times reported recently, at the urging of Elon Musk and DOGE, Trump turned to Palantir to carry out the vision expressed in his March executive order mentioned above. In fact, according to the Times, “at least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”
Palantir, named for the “seeing stones” described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is already at work, providing its data platform Foundry to several parts of the government. According to the Times:
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
Who is Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder? In addition to being a friend of Musk’s, Thiel was an early Trump supporter among the tech elites of Silicon Valley, donating $1.25 million to his 2016 campaign. He is also credited with shaping the political career of Vice President JD Vance, from his campaign to become a senator to his selection as Trump’s running mate. Thiel is part of a rarified brotherhood of tech and crypto-currency billionaires who share a commitment to a particular project of world domination by a technological elite. (And if that sounds like the raw material for a crazy conspiracy theory, bear with me again here.) Thiel was also an early funder of Clearview, the facial recognition software mentioned earlier.
In hiring Palantir and turning our data over to the company, Trump makes himself a useful tool, along with Vance, in the service of Thiel’s vision—just as he has been to the machinations of Project 2025’s principal author Russell Vought, who has different, but no less creepy dreams of domination.
The Dark Enlightenment
Thiel and his elite tech bros, including Musk, Internet pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Clearview founder Hoan Ton-That, share a particular philosophy. Other believers include figures like fervent Trump supporter Steve Bannon and Vice President Vance. This explicitly anti-democratic worldview goes by various names, including the “neo-reactionary movement” and the “Dark Enlightenment.”
Its founder is a software developer and political blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who has advocated replacing a “failed” democratic system with an absolute monarchy. Describing the Dark Enlightenment in The Nation magazine in October 2022, Chris Lehman observed that, in his run for Senate, JD Vance had adopted “a key plank of [Yarvin’s] plan for post-democratic overhaul—the strongman plan to ‘retire all government employees, which goes by the jaunty mnemonic ‘RAGE.’” (Any similarity to Musk’s DOGE is probably not coincidental.)
So, what is the Dark Enlightenment? It’s the negative image of an important intellectual movement of the 17th and18th centuries, the Enlightenment, whose principles formed, among other things, the basis for American democracy. These included such ideas as the fundamental equality of all human beings, the view that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and the existence of those “certain unalienable rights” mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Our response must be to oppose Trump’s onrushing version of American fascism as boldly and openly as we can.
The Dark Enlightenment explicitly opposes all of those and more. Lehman put it this way: “As Yarvin envisions it, RAGE is the great purge of the old operating system that clears the path for a more enlightened race of technocrats to seize power and launch the social order on its rational course toward information-driven self-realization.” That purge would necessarily produce “collateral casualties,” which would include “the nexus of pusillanimous yet all-powerful institutions Yarvin has dubbed ‘the Cathedral’—the universities, the elite media, and anything else that’s fallen prey to liberal perfidy.” Of course, we’ve already seen at least a partial realization of just such goals in Trump’s focused attacks on universities, journalists, and that collection of values described as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
On that last point, it should be noted that Yarvin and his followers also tended to be adherents of an “intellectual” current called “human biological diversity” championed by Steven Sailer, another Yarvin acolyte. That phrase has been appropriated by contemporary proponents of what used to be called eugenics, or scientific racism. It’s Charles Murray’s 1994 pseudo-scientific Bell Curve dressed up in high-flown pseudo-philosophy.
However, there’s more to the Dark Enlightenment than authoritarianism and racism. One stream, populated especially by Thiel and other tech bros, has an eschatology of sorts. This theology of the Earth’s end-times holds that elite humans will eventually (perhaps even surprisingly soon) achieve eternal life through physical communion with machines, greatly augmenting their capacities through artificial intelligence. That’s important to them because they’ve given up on the Earth. This planet is already too small and used up to sustain human life for long, they feel. Hence, our human destiny is instead to rule the stars. This is the theology underlying Elon Musk’s hunger for Mars. Anything that stands in the way of such a destiny must and shall be swept away on the tide of a tech bros future. (For an excellent explication of the full worldview shared by such would-be masters of the rest of us—and the rest of the universe as well—take a look at Adam Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.)
Surveillance Everywhere?
Back in my own corner of the world, the San Francisco Police Department has come a long way since those ancient days of clumsy phone tapping. Recently, a cryptocurrency billionaire, Chris Larsen, gave the SFPD $9.4 million to upgrade its surveillance tech. They’ll use the money to outfit a new Real Time Investigation Center (RTIC) with all the latest toys. “We’re going to be covering the entire city with drones,” claimed RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire. Imagine my joyful anticipation!
How should defenders of democracy respond to the coming reality of near-constant, real-time government surveillance? We can try to shrink and hide, of course, but that only does their job for them, by driving us into a useless underground. Instead, we should probably live as if everything we do, even in supposedly “secure” places (real and virtual), is visible to the Trump regime. Our response must be to oppose Trump’s onrushing version of American fascism as boldly and openly as we can. Yes, some of us will be harassed, imprisoned, or worse, but ultimately, the only answer to mass surveillance by those who want to be our overlords is open, mass defiance.
Report Names 'Corporate Oligarchs' Who Are Cashing In as Trump-GOP Austerity Assails Workers
"Trump's presidency is a vehicle for billionaires to loot the government and line their own pockets, while working people bear the cost," said one advocate.
Jun 18, 2025
Climate action, pro-democracy, and other civil society groups have warned for months that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are intent on cutting essential programs that millions of Americans rely on while providing the richest households and corporations with at least $5 trillion in tax cuts and other benefits.
But while tech CEO Elon Musk has been highly visible since President Donald Trump took office and selected him to spearhead the administration's slashing of hundreds of thousands of federal jobs at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—an advisory board Musk has since left—other billionaires who are among the top people set to cash in from Trump's policies are less known to the public, even as they wield considerable influence over corporate regulations, privatization, and right-wing attacks on renewable energy.
In a report released Tuesday, the grassroots group Popular Democracy in Action details how six of the top beneficiaries of Trump's assault on social services and his xenophobic, pro-corporate, anti-science policies are cashing in while people across the U.S. struggle with the rising cost of living; fear the administration's mass deportation campaign; and brace for cuts to Medicaid, education, and Social Security.
Along with household names like Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—a former Trump critic—the report, titled Trump's Corporate Oligarchs, points to fossil fuel billionaire Harold G. Hamm, founder and chair of Continental Resources, as someone who has spent years working "behind the scenes to advance oil and gas interests."
Hamm is not among the more than 10 billionaires who have nabbed powerful positions within Trump's administration—making his Cabinet the richest in U.S. history, with a collective net worth of $460 billion. But with close ties to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Hamm has pushed to undo former President Joe Biden's fossil fuel regulations within the Inflation Reduction Act and urged Trump to fast-track drilling permits, likely harming poor and rural communities that are disproportionately used for fossil fuel extraction.
Last year, it was Hamm who organized a dinner at Trump's Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where the then-presidential candidate allegedly promised 20 oil and gas executives he would repeal environmental regulations if they raised $1 billion for his campaign.
Hamm's company reported over $714 million in tax savings in 2018 from Trump's so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which included the corporate tax cuts that the GOP now seeks to make permanent—while taxpayers pay more than $20 billion per year toward fossil fuel subsidies, putting their own communities at risk from climate disasters.
Hamm and Trump's other wealthy donors are able to benefit directly from their chosen candidate's policies—to the detriment of the American public—"because the U.S. is currently functioning as an oligarchy: a government where a small group of powerful, wealthy people are calling the shots," reads the report.
George Zoley is another lesser-known oligarch who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump's campaigns and is now reaping the rewards as the private prison corporation he founded, GEO Group, benefits directly from the president's mass deportation campaign.
Zoley told shareholders shortly after Trump was reelected in November that the coming anti-immigration crackdown would present an "unprecedented opportunity" for GEO Group, which provides 40% of the beds used for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and is the largest provider of ICE transportation services.
The company was also awarded a $1 billion, 15-year contract to open and run the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
"GEO Group is incentivized by profit to be a willing and enthusiastic partner in the Trump administration's mass incarceration,
detention, and deportation plans," reads the report. "GEO Group has been and will continue to be a key force behind the targeting and criminalization of poor, working-class, marginalized communities—including immigrants."
Trump's anti-immigration agenda is also being partially fueled by big data firm Palantir, co-founded by another of the oligarchs profiled by Popular Democracy in Action: Peter Thiel, a former mentor of Vice President JD Vance who, despite publicly criticizing Trump during his first term, provided "mission-critical" digital profiling tools to ICE to help track immigrants and conduct raids.
Thiel's "anti-democratic, libertarian philosophy" also underpinned the Trump administration and DOGE's work "dismantling federal agencies, attacking diversity and equity programs, pushing deregulation, and dismantling public aid."
Despite his past criticism of Trump, Thiel's often secretive firm is projected to report more than $2.6 billion in revenue from government contracts in 2025 as Palantir provides support to the president's mass deportation agenda.
"Trump's presidency is a vehicle for billionaires to loot the government and line their own pockets, while working people bear the cost," Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper, co-executive directors of Popular Democracy in Action, said in a statement. "These cuts to Medicare, housing, [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits, and immigrant protections aren't accidents—they're part of a calculated scheme to turn public suffering into private profit."
The report names Musk, the world's richest person with a net worth of $389.4 billion, as the top beneficiary of the Trump administration, even though the Tesla CEO has officially parted ways with the White House.
After spending $235 million to help Trump get elected, in addition to wielding unprecedented influence over the administration, Musk is poised to benefit from billions of dollars in government contracts and foreign deals for his Starlink satellite service—all while benefiting from Trump's tax cuts and pushing to gut the social safety net.
The report also highlights Bezos, who has been accused of censoring The Washington Post's coverage of Trump and the 2024 election, as a top beneficiary of the president's second term. Bezos' space technology company, Blue Origin, was awarded a $2.3 billion contract in April, and he has pledged to "help" Trump as he moves toward "reducing regulation"—including by gutting top worker protection agencies and placing low-income workers at Amazon in harm's way.
Popular Democracy in Action also highlighted corporate landlord Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Big Pharma giant Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks. Both have benefited from Trump's tax cuts, while Schwarzman has pushed for corporate deregulation and fought against protections for renters. Ricks was a major opponent of the Inflation Reduction Act's Medicare drug price negotiations program, and benefited recently when Trump "signed a healthcare executive order that will create longer delays before Medicare can negotiate certain drug prices," making healthcare more expensive for seniors while raising Eli Lilly's profits.
"In a representative democracy, elected officials are supposed to respond to the priorities and interests of the people," reads the report. "Trump's 'oligarchs' are billionaires who are influencing political decision-making in order to increase their wealth."
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