A billionaire businessman has been elected President of the United States for a second term, and the word “oligarchy” is entering the vocabulary of citizens all across the country. The evidence is uncanny: a monopolist at the reins of the nation, the three richest people in the country attending his inauguration and now the richest one of all is helping run the government with him. Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is now also in a position of power as a member of Trump’s new administration. But when looking into what Musk actually does for Trump and what this means for the future of the country, the information is both concerning and pathetic.
Musk is now running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a joke name given to him by a user of X (also known as Twitter), which Musk bought and renamed in 2022. In the simplest terms, Musk’s job doesn’t exist. According to Campaign Legal, DOGE was a rebrand of the U.S. Digital Service, established following Trump’s reelection. The position was given to Musk in an attempt to “fix” the government Trump and his supporters claim again and again was broken. Musk’s solution to this? Use his economic and media dominance to get a firm grasp on the federal government, all the while funneling even more money to himself.
The defining traits of an oligarch according to Oxford Languages include shrinking the democratic value of a nation, retracting the wingspan of the federal government to give more power to the few as opposed to the many, the few being the rich. Musk has already taken direct steps to making the pool of federal power smaller and smaller, one of these steps being by offering buyouts to employees of the federal government. These buyout plans involve eight months of pay in exchange for immediate termination. Over two million workers work for the US government, and not one wasn’t offered this plan, with around 60,000 already accepting the offer as of Feb. 11, 2025 according to USA Today.
The U.S. was built on the philosophy of giving power to those reluctant to it, and while this precedent doesn’t need to hold up today to a T, the richest man in the world running the most powerful country in the world will always lead to regression. Trump is just as money-hungry as he is power-hungry, and by putting Musk at his side as he cuts funding and restricts democracy, many more citizens will soon learn the meaning of the word “oligarchy.”
