Throw rock at him: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally in New Jersey. Photo: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images
The US election is becoming a battle of billionaires … sort of. There are those lining up behind Donald Trump and those too scared to line up behind anything. Two of the country’s most venerable newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have been pressured by billionaire owners not to endorse the Kamala Harris campaign.
South African-born biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the biggest shareholder in the Los Angeles Times, pressured the editor not to endorse Harris for president. Jeff Bizos, Amazon boss, made a similar move against his editorial team at the Washington Post.
To be clear: any news media should be free to decide whether to endorse a campaign or not. This is part of the free exchange of ideas. If your favourite paper or news channel endorses someone or something you don’t support, you are free to roll with the punch or to change your personal news-source preference.
What is a problem is the owner leaning on the editorial team. While, in reality, the owner exerts ultimate control (whether they are a company board or a person), the long-standing practice in journalism is to appoint editors and leave them to do their thing. That is, in a country with at least a pretence of free speech. While traditional models of rights pit the individual versus the state, big business can be a powerful dampener on rights. Even in apartheid South Africa, despite anything but free speech, owners usually gave a fake excuse when leaning on editors so as to claim they were not reacting to political pressure. One example is when Cape Times editor Tony Heard was fired in 1987, ostensibly for business reasons, but everyone knew it was because he published an interview with Oliver Tambo.
Back to the US: ex-Twitter (X is silly) is owned by a narcissistic billionaire, currently the richest person in the world — also as it happens, former South African — Elon Musk. For some time he has been promoting right-wing causes, particularly transphobia. That angle was possibly a consequence of a child of his transitioning and finding it hard to cope with that reality. It was only after someone took a shot at Trump in July that he went full Trump.
A large part of the Musk modus operandi is simply reposting other people’s junk conspiratorial claims, often with minimal to no comment. These claims are mostly xenophobic, such as claims that millions of “illegals” are being deliberately imported by the Democrats to boost their voting numbers. There is no evidence that non-citizens attempt to register to vote in significant numbers. Why would they? The penalties are high, including deportation. Why would an undocumented migrant risk exposing themselves when it’s in their best interests to vanish into the woodwork? It’s also not a given that migrants support the Democrats. However, with the opening speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally “joking” that there’s a “floating island of garbage” called “Puerto Rico”, possibly the Republicans don’t want Hispanic votes. Though I note that Puerto Ricans are actually US citizens, the sort of racial profiling the Trump camp subjects them to does not respect such boundaries.
But back to the starting point: is there a battle of billionaires?
In Camp Trump, there is Trump himself (possibly a billionaire but he is not exactly transparent about his personal circumstances), Musk and a slew of the old Republican regulars, as well as some from Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, a tech investor, fuelled the rise of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. Thiel opened the door to other tech investors, who are now in the Trump camp, a big change from the previous trend of tech moguls favouring the Democrats.
The biggest change is how these billionaires are not just funding behind the scenes but making themselves part of the campaign. Musk has not only gone full Trump on his own platform (annoyingly, he can’t be unfollowed so I see all too much of this), but speaks at rallies. In the past, billionaires may have found it awkward to be so exposed and worried that the voter would see them as promoting oligarchy.
Strangely, Trump’s most enthusiastic base is the relatively uneducated, the very people who would lose most from a concentration of wealth. Trump’s way with such crowds defies logic. He has weird segues that he describes as “the weave” where, without logic, he builds word salad to deviate from a difficult subject. In September for example, he went into a lengthy riff about a “giant faucet” that could be turned on to give California all the water it needed. Asked a question about funding childcare, he went into a weird ramble about tariffs on imports.
Conventional media have been accused of sanewashing this weirdness — converting it into a story that is vaguely rational. The real story is that Trump has no rational policy ideas. What is the actual problem behind that? Is he deliberately constructing these weird riffs to avoid the inconvenience of having actual policies, or is he just senile and his supporters are too deep in denial to care? On the first: he has form. In 2016, he promised to come up with something far better than Obamacare and nothing happened — yet he was elected and got away with not delivering on the promise. Then there was building The Wall. Hardly any of that happened. So possibly he has just realised that he can be content-free and get away with it.
So why is this appealing to narcissistic billionaires? Simple. They believe he is one of them. If his entire platform is built on xenophobia and culture wars with no actual substance, he can do pretty much what he likes — even more so now that his corrupt supreme court has given presidents near-total immunity from prosecution. And they believe his agenda is theirs so they are along for the wacky ride.
Well, here‘s the thing. Have you heard of Mikhail Khodorkovsky? He was Russia’s richest man when Vladimir Putin first took office as Russia’s president. He owned the corruptly-built Yukos oil empire but had political ambitions. Putin had him jailed on possibly trumped-up charges and he lost everything. Now in exile after 10 years in jail, he claims to be a Putin opponent. But inside Russia, the oligarchs now know their place. Putin is their boss.
To the US oligarchs backing Trump: he admires Putin. Watch whose boots you lick.
Philip Machanick is an emeritus associate professor of computer science at Rhodes University and a Makana Citizens Front councillor.