2025: The Year to Challenge the Billionaires

Media coverage of mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s increasingly tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement turned into a political soap opera as 2024 ended, with a blow-up over whether to grant H-1B skilled-worker visas to certain migrants. Things got so heated that Musk promised, “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” while longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon dismissed Musk as “a toddler” and accused him of advancing an agenda that was “about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages.” Right-wing influencers charged that Musk was censoring them on his X platform, and Britain’s Telegraph reported that “supporters of President-elect Donald Trump teeter on the brink of a civil war over immigration.” When Musk’s wealthy sidekick in the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency” boondoggle, Vivek Ramaswamy, referred to American workers as mediocre, Fox News joined the fray, reporting, “The wealthy businessmen now find themselves butting heads with Trump’s most ardent base.”

It is a safe bet that this sort of bad craziness will escalate as clashes between Republicans become a dominant political story of 2025.

Trump won the presidential election by a narrow margin, after cobbling together a coalition that ran the gamut from immigrant-bashing xenophobes to tech giants who are more than happy to expand their fortunes by exploiting workers of all backgrounds. Trump’s billionaire backers paid his way during last year’s campaign—for which Musk, the richest man in the world, made himself the largest donor, with his pro-Trump spending reaching roughly a quarter billion dollars. (And that’s not even counting the impact of Musk’s relentless pro-Trump advocacy on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he purchased as the campaign was getting started.)

No surprise then that Trump sided with Musk as the conflict erupted. Trump’s position on the visa question was uncharacteristically reasonable. Downplaying his past criticisms of the H-1B program, the former president said, ”I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

The reality is that Trump is a believer in Musk. The president-elect bows to the mega-billionaire for the same reason that Trump bows to the other big-money interests that have sustained his political endeavors.

Though he has played a billionaire on TV, Trump’s tumultuous financial record, including six bankruptcies for his hotel and casino businesses, has often left him in economically vulnerable spots. He has a long history of playing up to billionaire-class oligarchs, and during his first term he made a point of giving them massive tax cuts.

There’s little doubt that Trump will seek to do so again in his second term, providing further confirmation of the late former president Jimmy Carter’s observations from almost a decade ago about the damage done by billionaire-guided governance. “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president,” explained Carter in the summer of 2015, just weeks after Trump launched his first presidential bid.

“And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.… The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody who’s already in Congress has a lot more to