Jeff Bezos is so clearly an oligarch. Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images


February 11, 2025   5 mins

When you hear the word “oligarch”, you might imagine someone like Farkhad Akhmedov, one of the 50 wealthiest Russians. In his book Mastering the Universe, economics professor Rob Larson writes that Akhmedov’s personal superyacht features a pair of helipads, a mini-submarine, and a pool across nine decks. His enjoyment of this floating “beast” is marred only by his anxiety about “keeping it from his ex-wife”.

The amount of wealth hoarded by Russian businessmen is staggering. Forbes estimates Akhmedov’s 2025 net worth at $1.6 billion. To put that into perspective, imagine an immortal being, perhaps a vampire, travelling to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day since then, the vampire somehow acquires the equivalent of 1,000 contemporary American dollars. He never spends any of it. Perhaps he just stacks the money in coffins. The vampire will become a millionaire by sometime in 1495. In 2025, though, he’ll still be less than a fifth of the way to having a billion dollars.

Akhmedov is clearly very wealthy. Yet if he were an American, he wouldn’t even make it into the list of the 400 wealthiest US citizens. Why, then, does Russia have “oligarchs” while America apparently only has rich people?

Occasionally, Bernie Sanders will use the o-word to describe people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, each of whom have hundreds of times the net worth of Farkhad Akhmedov. When this happens, the most common rebuttal is that Russian oligarchs typically owe their wealth (at least in part) to their political connections, whereas American billionaires became wealthy through the power of the free market.

“Why does Russia have “oligarchs” while America apparently only has rich people?”

It’s true that plenty of Russian oligarchs owe much of their wealth to a particularly brazen form of corruption. In the Soviet era, economic resources were, in theory, the collective property of the whole population, though in practice they were controlled by an unaccountable state bureaucracy. After the collapse of the USSR, no one asked the Russian people whether they wanted to enter an era of capitalism or experiment with some form of democratic socialism instead. There was no popular referendum on whether to privatise public assets. Instead, in many cases, canny bureaucrats simply turned state enterprises into their own private fiefdoms, while the population at large underwent economic shock therapy.

There are three big problems, however, with the idea that America’s ultra-wealthy capitalists aren’t oligarchs because they made their fortunes the “right way”: in the private sector. The first is that the distinction between the two systems is less clear than it might seem at a quick glance. In post-Soviet Russia, private-sector actors grew astoundingly rich off the state, as one economic order was surpassed by another. But many ultra-rich Americans also benefit plenty from political connections, and none of them are too proud to accept government handouts.

The richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, has earned tens of billions of dollars directly from government contracts. That’s many times more than the total wealth of a typical Russian “oligarch”. And that’s not to mention SpaceX and Tesla, which, as Chris Isidore writes, both “got started” (and “survived their early days”) thanks to assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts and loans. That’s the foundation on which Musk’s fortune was built.

More generally, the American tech sector, often celebrated as a powerhouse of private-sector innovation — and certainly the source of a great many billionaires — has benefited dramatically from the blurred lines between private wealth and state policy. The only TED talk I ever recommend that people watch is one by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who goes through the components of an iPhone one by one and discusses where they come from. Pretty much everything that makes a smartphone “smart”, from the GPS to the touchscreen to Siri to the internet itself, stems from public-sector innovation. The breakthroughs happened in the Department of Defense or in public universities or via researchers in labs funded by grants from the federal government. In a less explicit way than the Russian oligarchs, America’s tech oligarchs have found ways to convert state investment into private profits.

The second and deeper problem with the denial of American oligarchy is that an oligarch isn’t just someone who gets rich the wrong way. “Oligarchy” is government by a small group of powerful individuals. What makes someone an oligarch is that they exercise great power, not that they benefit from association with those who do.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. Musk or Bezos can replace any particular Tesla or Amazon worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

These days, in fact, America’s billionaire corporate overlords exercise more oligarchic power over the political process than their counterparts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As Larson writes, when Vladimir Putin consolidated his personal rule, his “mandate was to bring” the oligarchs “back under control”. The informal “entente” held that Russia’s ultra-rich would scale back their interference with politics, and not “complain too much when Putin’s state locked up political opponents”. In exchange, a more stable regime would secure their property and wealth.

American oligarchs have made no such compromise. When Musk is mad about a potential spending deal in Congress, for example, he can spend all day rage-posting about it on X, and explicitly threaten to finance primary challenges against any Republican congressmen who votes for the deal. Few politicians would dare ignore such a threat. Even the billionaire who currently serves as President of the United States hesitates to butt heads too directly with Musk on contentious issues. After all, Musk’s riches put Trump in the White House. Compared to Musk’s $455 billion, Trump’s fortune of $6.61 billion is almost cute.

Nor are the oligarchs confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her campaign. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations — though this looks modest compared to Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasised in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. American oligarchs have shot into the financial stratosphere, at least in part, due to the decades of market-fundamentalist public policy first popularised by Ronald Reagan but continued by the likes of Bill Clinton (who gave us Nafta and a grimly Dickensian “welfare reform”) and Barack Obama (who responded to the 2008 crash by bailing out banks and leaving homeowners underwater). Even Trump, who campaigned as a “populist”, spent much of his first term pushing lower taxes for the wealthy and slashing the regulatory state. And the somnolent administration of Joe Biden wasn’t prepared to reverse this trend.

If this process has been slower and less dramatic than the birth of the Russian oligarchs at the close of the Soviet era, its results have been far more striking. Four Americans (Musk, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) are expected to become trillionaires within the next five years. And following a decades-long, highly effective business offensive against union organising, the vast majority of American workers are unorganised. America’s labour laws are vastly less favourable to union organising than regulatory regimes in otherwise comparable nations. “Sympathy strikes”, for example, where one group of workers joins a strike to help another win their demands, are illegal. But it is perfectly legal to “permanently replace” striking workers. This leaves us with no political force that could meaningfully stand up to the power of America’s oligarchs.

We could at least start by acknowledging that American oligarchs exist. It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call their comparatively poor cousins in hostile nations “oligarchs”. As they say in Alcoholic Anonymous, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.


Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist and the host of the Give Them an Argument podcast.

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