Biden warns of dangerous threat of new age of ‘robber barons’ in farewell presidential address

President Joe Biden on Wednesday warned that a new Gilded Age of “robber barons” was in danger of eroding Americans’ hard-won freedoms unless the government takes steps to ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay a fair share of taxes and aren’t allowed to exercise “outsized” power.

In remarks deliberately tailored to echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Biden said he was just as concerned as Eisenhower had been about what he described as a “tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”

That, combined with a dangerous “concentration of technology, power and wealth,” he added, is forming a new “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

Americans are being “buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power,” said Biden, who decried the end of fact-checking efforts by top social media platforms as letting the truth be “smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”

“We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power,” he continued, adding that the rise of AI — “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time” — needs safeguards to prevent it from being able to “spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation,” said the president.

“We must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy, and good for all humankind. In the age of AI, it’s more important than ever that the people must govern, and as the land of liberty, America, not China, must lead the world in the development of AI,” he emphasized.

He called on Americans — including future presidents, legislators, jurists, journalists and the public — to “confront these powerful forces” by reforming the tax code, getting big money out of political campaigns and enacting term limits for the highest court in the land.

The president’s speech from the Oval Office, delivered from behind the iconic desk hewn from timbers salvaged from H.M.S. Resolute and gifted to then-president Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880, was his fifth from the Oval Office. The most recent speech before his farewell remarks was the address he delivered to explain his unprecedented decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race and cede his party’s nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden’s stark warning of a tech-fueled oligarchy seizing outsized power and threatening America’s deepest-held values comes just days before Trump is set to take office after having won the 2024 election with the aid of the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.

In the months since the 2024 election, other technology figures who once were seen as bulwarks against Trump — including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — have donated vast sums of money to the 47th president’s inauguration.

Zuckerberg, who once was seen as a reliable donor to liberal causes, has in recent weeks taken a hard-right turn and ordered the end to fact-checking efforts at his companies as well as diversity initiatives and even an end to rules banning hate speech from his platforms.

Biden called on Americans to stand up against this rising tech threat just as Americans “stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts” during the last Gilded Age over a century ago.

“They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal and helped put us on a path to building the largest middle class, most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again,” he said.

“We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren. We must keep pushing forward and push faster. There’s no time to waste,” Biden added.

Biden concluded with his “eternal thanks” to Americans and said he was giving them his word that he still believes in “the idea for which this nation stands, a nation where the strengths of our institutions and the people matter and must endure.”

He added: “Now, it’s your turn to stand guard — may you all be the keeper of the flame.”