Vox

We’ve never seen a political donor this loud, proud, and culturally influential.

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have become an inseparable duo. Since Trump’s reelection, the richest man in the world — and one of Trump’s top campaign donors — has been a shadow trailing him at his Florida residence. The tech billionaire has taken center stage in the incoming administration, promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget.

“We are in an era that I call ‘in-your-face oligarchy,’” says Jeffrey A. Winters, a professor at Northwestern who researches oligarchs and inequality. Twenty years ago, it was a challenge to get his students to understand that there were oligarchs in the US. Now, he says, “I have a very hard time getting students to accept the idea that there’s democracy.”