Historians weigh Musk's political power against Gilded Age moguls

Musk donated more than $400 million to Republican midterm causes

Elon Musk has donated more than $400 million to Republican causes ahead of this year’s midterm elections — far more than mega-donors Michael Bloomberg and George Soros have given to Democrats combined, according to media outlets including The Washington Post and CNN. This month, Musk’s company SpaceX temporarily restricted Ukraine’s use of the Starlink satellite system, causing some Ukrainian drones to fall from the sky.

The two developments have renewed a long-running question about the political power of the very rich and where Musk fits in American history. Kara Swisher, the longtime tech journalist and a Musk critic, recently told Morning Edition that no private citizen — and in this case the world’s richest person — should be making wartime decisions. David Nasaw, an emeritus professor of history at the City University of New York, agrees.

Nasaw, who has written a biography of Andrew Carnegie, the late 19th century steel magnate, placed Musk’s rise in historical context. “The millionaires, billionaires and now trillionaires have always exercised undue power over the political system,” Nasaw said. “But there’s never been anyone like Musk.”

Nasaw noted that Musk was the first person to cross the trillionaire threshold. Musk also oversaw DOGE, which dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, a massive, congressionally created foreign aid operation. Over the years, Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, have received more than $30 billion in federal contracts, subsidies, loans and tax credits, Nasaw said.

“I call it an unholy alliance,” Nasaw said. “He makes money and then he returns that money to keep those who are friendly to him in power.”

Nasaw said the current democratic system cannot check someone like Musk and argued that Congress should pass laws raising taxes on billionaires and limiting campaign spending. Otherwise, he said, “Democracy is in a death spiral towards oligarchy.” NPR said it reached out to Musk for comment and received no reply.

Richard White, an emeritus history professor at Stanford, said Musk’s power is not unique in American history and in fact pales in comparison with J.P. Morgan, the dominant banker of the Gilded Age, which encompassed the final decades of the 19th century. In 1895, Morgan bailed the U.S. out of a financial crisis.

“J.P. Morgan thought that he was a co-partner with government,” White said. “Once you’ve saved the United States from having to default on its promise to pay its debts in gold, you realize you have a great deal of influence.”

White noted that Morgan’s influence did not last. The banker merged three major continental railroads into a behemoth known as the Northern Securities Company, and President Teddy Roosevelt, the trust-buster, knew a monopoly when he saw one and broke it up.

Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, offered a more favorable view. Tupy said non-conformists like Musk often lead innovative companies that help drive economic growth, and that conformity makes societies stagnant; a nation, he said, needs non-conformists to push scientific and technological advancement. He called political spending a constitutional right and opposed campaign spending limits, a position he acknowledged is particularly controversial when it comes to the ultra-rich. “Wealthy accomplished people, having been participants in the global economy and in the American capital system, may actually have better views on what makes the American economy grow than the median voter,” Tupy said.

The limits of campaign spending as leverage were on display in Wisconsin last year, where Musk spent more than $20 million on the state Supreme Court race and his candidate lost by 10 percentage points.

White said Musk has benefited during Trump’s second term, but a Democratic administration could change his circumstances. “If you had a president and a Congress who were opposed to Musk, they could break him in a year,” White said. “SpaceX doesn’t exist without government funding.” He added that Democrats are already talking about investigating Musk if they win the House in next week’s midterms.

Musk fired back on X, his social media platform. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Musk wrote. “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them.”

H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, said the debate over the political influence of the super-rich highlights long-running tensions in American history between democracy and capitalism. Democracy, Brands said, rests on equality — including the principle of “one person, one vote” — while capitalism rests on inequality, with people born with different characteristics and talents rewarded accordingly.

Brands said capitalism surged ahead of democracy in the late 19th century, producing moguls such as Morgan and Carnegie alongside a huge wealth gap, and that progressives in the early 20th century responded by breaking up trusts and banning corporate donations to candidates to restore democracy. Some people now see a second Gilded Age, with tech and infrastructure titans such as Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison at the top of the heap. After Trump’s two terms, Brands said he expects another era of democratic reform. “I think it’s coming over the horizon,” he said.