What are they really seeking?

Trump, Musk, Sacks, and the other billionaires taking over in three weeks and one day want to do something quite different from what the previous generation of conservatives sought.

Friends,

In three weeks and one day, a bunch of bilious billionaires will essentially take over the U.S. government.

What do they want?

Consider where they came from, who mentored them, who pushed them on Trump, and who continues to exercise influence on them: Peter Thiel.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and the cofounder of PayPal. He’s also the hub of Trump’s second-term billionaire braintrust.

Thiel mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his funds, Mithril Capital, then launched a venture fund backed by Thiel. Thiel then bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later convinced Trump to name Vance his vice president.

Thiel also worked closely at PayPal with Elon Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump elected and whom Trump has chosen to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Thiel’s venture-capital fund, Founders Fund, was an early investor in several of Musk’s companies, including Space X, the tunneling firm the Boring Company, and brain-chip startup Neuralink.

Thiel also mentored billionaire David Sacks, who worked with Thiel at PayPal and wrote for the Stanford Review, the right-wing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1987. Trump has named Sachs as the White House’s incoming “AI and crypto czar.”

Thiel had put Jim O’Neill in charge of Thiel’s personal foundation. Trump just picked O’Neill to be deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Thiel Capital’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is reportedly handling tech policy during the Trump transition.

What are these people really seeking? What does Thiel want?

A former generation of wealthy U.S. conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.

But this group doesn’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

As Thiel has written:

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Hello?

If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power — as Musk, Thiel, Sachs, and other oligarchs are putting on full display — which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

History shows that under fascist strongmen, no one is safe — not even oligarchs.