The Ultrarich Have Reshaped Presidential Elections. Here's Where They're Looking Next.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Those donors -- Musk ($291.5 million), Timothy Mellon ($197 million), Miriam Adelson ($148.3 million), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($143.5 million), Ken Griffin ($108.4 million), and Jeffrey and Janine Yass ($101.1 million) -- all exclusively supported Donald Trump and other Republican candidates (with the exception of the Yasses, who gave a nominal $1,500 contribution on the Democratic side).
55% : Researchers found that Musk seems to have tweaked the platform's algorithm to promote content favorable to Trump, something quite valuable but hard to precisely value.
51% : And how will this new spending affect American elections and public policy?
51% : Musk has gained unprecedented access to Trump and unparalleled influence over the new administration through his White House office and activities for the amorphous Department of Government Efficiency, which is cutting federal employees and programs and engaging in the deep mining of governmental data (in many cases on issues with which Musk, the world's richest man, has a financial conflict of interest).
51% : All of this portends the rise of an American oligarchy, in which the richest individuals have an outsize influence on politics and public policy, made possible only because of the Supreme Court's First Amendment decisions, beginning with Buckley and continuing with Citizens United and others.
49% : Right after coming into office, Trump gave TikTok a reprieve, something that benefited supportive megadonor Jeff Yass, who owns a stake in its parent company.
44% : In the 2024 presidential election campaign, according to OpenSecrets data, Kamala Harris and her allies raised nearly $2 billion compared with Trump and his allies' $1.45 billion.
39% : As I have long argued, the court took wrong turns in Buckley and Citizens United in viewing societal attempts to achieve political equality (or at least minimize grotesque political inequality) as "wholly foreign to the First Amendment."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.