Deconstructing the new American oligarchy

Two genres of image loom large over the news feeds of the Trump 2.0 era so far: photos of shackled men and women, rounded up for detention and deportation, and pictures of various modes of Tesla protest; vandalized Model 3s and assailed dealerships. They are not unrelated, of course, the latter capturing the spasms of resistance to the cruel authoritarian state documented by the former.

Those images of migrants being herded into airplane cargo holds, into tents, into detention centers, of tourists who were thrown into solitary confinement, of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student arrested by ICE, of the Venezuelan migrants deported to a prison camp in El Salvador, gruesomely posed and photographed by the state itself, the photos proactively disseminated for maximum dystopian effect, exemplify the brutal and performative politics of a Trump regime consolidating executive power and lustily fulfilling campaign promises. The cuffed migrants given no due process before being shipped to a brutal prison camp, the tourists offered no reason for their extended confinement, Khalil charged with no crime.

Then there are the husks of burnt-out Teslas, RESIST scrawled across the showroom walls, the protestors with Swasticar signs. The images are a stirring and constant reminder that the most ubiquitous site of protest to the horrors above, to the gutting of the federal workforce, to the systematized dehumanization of migrants and minorities, to the general slide into fascism—is a car dealership. The target is a luxury tech product, and the protestors and saboteurs make it unignorable that we are in the ides of an American oligarchy, and that we must recognize its singular authoritarian and retributive character if we are to hope to effectively confront and eventually dismantle it.

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On X, where so many of these images rain down—the deportation porn promoted by the site’s owner, the posts featuring charred EVs swimming against the algorithmic currents—Elon Musk attacks judges whose injunctions are slowing the mass deportation effort, retweets broadsides against political opponents, and boosts accounts that come to the defense of Tesla, including but not limited to the new Director of the FBI, Kash Patel. On Monday, Patel affirmed on the platform that the bureau would be investigating property crime against Musk’s electric car company as domestic terrorism, and earned himself an RT from Musk in the process. Patel joins US attorney general Pam Bondi, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, and president Trump himself in circling the executive wagons around Musk’s car company, launching a federal task force to investigate vandalism against Teslas and Tesla dealerships.

Three men who have been arrested for three different incidents of vandalism on Tesla property—in South Carolina, Colorado, and Oregon—now face twenty years in prison on terror charges brought by Bondi’s Department of Justice. In case the threat of retribution for dissent wasn’t made clear by all the due process-free imprisonments and deportations, Trump went ahead and made the link explicit:

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla," he wrote in a Truth Social post. "Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!"

It’s not all bluster. As WIRED’s Caroline Haskins reports, the domestic terror designation gives federal and local law enforcement new powers to surveil protestors, and for Musk and DOGE to access data turned up in the investigations. In other words, the richest man in the world, the owner of seven tech companies—including the most important right-wing propaganda platform—whose wealth is bound up in part in the value of a car company, is facilitating the state response to people protesting his unelected role in dismantling federal services and accelerating the drive to authoritarianism.

So here we are. It has been simultaneously surreal, disturbing, and continuously unsurprising to watch this unfold. After decades of worsening income inequality, of the hollowing out of state capacity, of concentrating power among the ultra-rich, this is reality now. Considering the new heights of influence reached by the Silicon Valley tech giants, and the emboldenment of the titans who run them; the notion that the most erratic, richest, and most desperately approval-seeking among them would seize power? Well, it tracks.¹

Of course there’s Elon Musk, installing StarLink wifi in the White House, and well obviously he is positioning himself to receive billions in federal contracts and why wouldn’t he be on the White House lawn, televising a car commercial as a news conference, alongside the US president? The only thing that feels truly shocking at this point is that Musk isn’t using Grok in DOGE’s new government AI chatbots, and is opting for Anthropic’s Claude instead, for the time being, anyway.

Look, sure, the American oligarchy’s power has been effectively entrenched for years, but there’s something striking about its final, open presentation in the White House, in the pretenses being effortlessly peeled away like the paneling on a Cybertruck. Musk’s omnipresence and power brokering in the oval office, the notion that his presence there might even need to be explained at all a distant afterthought. The naked favor trading, the self-dealing, the old grifts with new coats of paint; the crypto and AI czar whose VC firm is heavily invested in crypto and AI companies. The defense tech contractor who publicly squeals with delight over the prospect of killing enemies of the state for profit.

Perhaps it took Silicon Valley’s penchant for disruption to render the tried and true robber baron model of wielding influence from the sidelines obsolete. Power once acquired through corporate lobbying, the funding of influence groups, or via the occasional Congressionally-vetted cabinet post, is now openly and casually seized. Perhaps it took the wealth, ego, and entitlement of a Silicon Valley CEO to push through this final breach, his claims to futurity paving over audible protests and human rights injustices.

The other striking thing is just how tenuous it all is. As has been pointed out by folks like Hamilton Nolan and Tesla critic Eric Niedermeyer, Musk’s fortune, while vast, is less secure and more vulnerable than it appears. An ideal foil for Trump, Musk’s immense wealth and power is bound up in the long-gestating and self-cultivated mythology of his immense wealth and power. PayPal made him a multimillionaire, and SpaceX multiplied his fortune, but it’s Tesla that made him the richest man on Earth. And starting in the mid-2010s, when Musk began promising full self-driving features and robotaxis, Tesla’s value—not to mention Musk’s net worth—has been uniquely dependent on the successful cultivation of fantasies that have yet to materialize.

That historic wealth, along with his loyalty, is what validates Musk to Trump—he’s got the richest guy in the world running the government for him. Just like Trump always ostentatiously prioritized being perceived as a successful business magnate over actually operating as one, Musk, who really did build some successful companies, has continuously and exponentially inflated their value, potential, and power. A man who both is and pretends to be an ultrarich businessman and a man who both is and pretends to be an ultrarich tech entrepreneur are running the country.² It’s an oligarchy of speculative wealth and power made real; an oligarchy of science fiction, even.

That the fiction can be punctured to great effect is the insight central to the Takedown protests, and why targeting Tesla has proven effective: it reminds investors and consumers that Tesla is in reality merely a mid-sized auto manufacturer with stagnating sales in key markets, fierce competition from China, few to no new products on the horizon, and that it just recalled every single one of the 46,000 trucks it has sold because the panelling falls off, and you can bring Musk back down to earth.

Investors have plowed more and more money into Tesla over the last ten years because of Musk and his promises; if you can make it clear the extent that he has failed to deliver, make it so he can’t deliver, the house of cards might come down. I don’t think anyone has any illusions that they’re going to bankrupt Musk, or even cause him serious material hardship. But you might certainly embarrass him, put a dent in his weepy-Tony-Stark reputation, and even undermine his political standing as a result.

The best evidence that any of this is possible is that the attacks on Tesla are working in one important way: Musk is clearly and demonstrably affected by the backlash, which in turn stands to affect his semi-speculative empire.

The tech culture writer Max Read taxonimized, accurately, I think, the predominant strain of the newly recalibrated conservative movement as the Soy Right; the too-online, perpetually aggrieved faction that presents itself as masculine but is also afraid to take the subway or step foot in a city. Elon Musk, of course, is their avatar. A soy right CEO—a man who displays no compunction at all about destroying tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods, but chokes back tears on Fox News when someone mentions his companies’ declining stock prices.

“It’s difficult,” he admitted, red eyes glazing over. Meanwhile, major investors are calling on Musk to leave DOGE and refocus on Tesla—or find a new CEO. Musk was forced to hold an emergency all hands at the company to raise morale and appease spooked investors, and Trump, Lutnick, and the White House Press secretary all took to aggressively and openly boosting Tesla from their official perches.

Because of all of that—or, more darkly, because of the FBI and the DOJ’s vows to investigate Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists, thus giving investors reason to believe the animosity against the brand will die down—shares of Tesla spiked again on Monday, delivering Musk’s company its biggest one-day gain since election day last November. Once again, 21st century American oligarchy in action: The man administering the US state as much as anyone saw his immense wealth, bound up as it is in science fictional promises, threatened by protestors and direct action, summoned the heads of the nation’s federal investigators to combat them on his behalf, and spurred the sitting president and his department heads to make sales pitches for the embattled electric car company.

I know we’re numb to everything, but this is wild, straight-from-the-pages-of-cyberpunk-novels type stuff. But the modern state is willing, even happy to do all this on Musk’s behalf, thanks of course to his wealth, which he continues to pump into state-level elections on the GOP’s behalf, his status as the DOGE point man, doing the unpopular work of firing public servants and angling to replace them with AI, and his eagerness to use his platform to promote their pet causes—like, for instance, sharing posts and images supporting the administration’s deportation campaign—and to manufacture consent for notions gaining ground on the right like due process is simply too cumbersome to do for everybody.

That’s why Trump was happy to do a car commercial for Musk on the White House lawn a few weeks back, even if the most memorable part of the endeavor was a goofy Trumpism. “Wow, everything’s computer” was one of the first public moments in Trump’s second presidency that was both depoliticized enough and sufficiently gestured at the contours of “charm” to become a meme. It’s something your grandpa might say. But there’s more to it than that, I think; another reason it resonated. It isn’t just that Trump sounded like kind of a dummy, awed by the relatively common technology he was looking at, it’s how dully aligned with Musk’s governing philosophy (and philosophy in general) it is: Everything’s computer!

This is how Musk has extended his empire over the last ten years, SpaceX somewhat discounted. Problem with the Tesla manufacturing supply chain threatening to derail a quarterly report? Announce robotaxis and fake a self-driving demo—everything’s computer. The Cybertruck rollout a little underwhelming, and facing well-publicized problems with X, the everything app? How about some robot butlers and home robo-servants. After all, everything’s computer. Promise to slash the government and not sure how to prop it up or how seriously anyone is actually expecting you to take this DOGE thing? Announce an “AI-first strategy” to replace federal workers’ tasks—everything’s computer.

This is also a useful thing to keep in mind with regard to the new tech oligarchy, because if everything’s computer, then everything’s attack surface, too. This is why every Tesla dealership in the country has become a protest site, every Tesla on the road a target of ire, every Musk brand a source of derision. I recently spoke with a high level organizer who believes much of the future of the resistance to Musk’s moves will be carried out digitally, by hackers or tech workers. Meanwhile, there’s a website called Dogequest that purports to list every Tesla owner in the nation, and promises to remove yours if you sell it off. There’s a growing grassroots movement turning out to oppose the Musk-Trump nexus; 34,000 people just showed up at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour in Denver.

Smart, targeted campaigns, mass protest, and organized tactical resistances remain our best hope against the emboldened American oligarchy; it cannot be beaten back with blunt force, nor does it need to be. It is unusually brittle, built upon interlocking mythologies with distinct vulnerabilities—including the big mens’ twin perennially open wound egos. Musk will surely respond to future threats to his companies by leaning further on the Trumpist state, but the harder he leans, we hope, the more stress it bears and the more precarious the whole project becomes.

And let’s not underestimate the appetite for pushing back, either. I think it is even more latent, even more widespread than we might believe, even given we have not yet seen the hundreds of thousands of people in the street that Trump 1.0 or the George Floyd protests delivered. There is anger and fear nearly everywhere I look, online, sure, but also in the shaking heads at restaurants and in the grocery store checkout lines, Musk’s name cursed and always in the air.

I was a volunteer on my 3rd grade son’s field trip last week, and on the bus ride to the museum, I shit you not, some of the kids were pretending to shoot at Teslas out of the window with finger guns. These were not even my kids, I swear, and when I asked them why they were shooting the cars, one even said “well the cars are ok but they’re made by Elon Musk’” and went back to “bam-bam-bam”-ing them.

The evils of this formation of state are so easily intuited a child can comprehend them, there is a will to resist, it is widespread, and it can grow, if we are not beaten down by exhaustion, by the right’s drive to overwhelm, by threats of surveillance and retribution.

Things to remember perhaps as we return to our doomscrolls, to the interminable news of freshly orchestrated cruelties and atrocities, as the Democrats fail to register an opposition and the courts’ power falters. As American democracy sits more imperiled than at any point in my lifetime, as the images of mass oppression continue to proliferate, goaded on by Trump and his prodigal oligarch, I’m reminded of the famous lines from Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which I’ll leave you with here:

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.