Billionaires Take Smug Victory Lap After Trump’s Decisive Win
Republicans won big up and down the ballot in the 2024 election, and so did a key group of supporters: billionaire oligarchs who invested their immense wealth and resources in a red wave.
No one, of course, gloated more than Elon Musk, a top surrogate for president-elect Donald Trump and key megadonor to the MAGA cause. Confident at the relatively early hour of 10:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday night, he took to X (the platform known as Twitter when he bought it in 2022) to post a succinct update from Trump’s election party at Mar-a-Lago: “Game, set and match.” Later, he reprised a gag from his first day as the owner of Twitter, sharing a meme that showed him holding a sink in the Oval Office, with the caption “Let that sink in.” By the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he was declaring that “The people of America gave [Trump] a crystal clear mandate for change tonight.”
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, among the ultra-wealthy to publicly embrace Trumpism at the moment when Musk and other Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists did, reposted just about everything Musk said, as well as a photo of Musk at Trump’s late October rally in Madison Square Garden that was captioned “Most consequential human ever.” Ackman also quipped, “At least Peanut did not die in vain,” referring to the recent euthanizing of an OnlyFans model’s internet-famous pet squirrel by New York authorities — an incident that right-wingers held up as an example of government overreach in the weekend before the election. On Wednesday, Ackman hammered Vice President Kamala Harris for holding off on a concession call to Trump, at one point calling her “Pathetic.” (Harris did eventually call the president-elect.)
More rich Trump backers to take a victory lap included venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who posted that it was “morning again in America,” as well as Musk ally David Sacks, who on Tuesday night declared on X that “Nixon ’68 was The Greatest Comeback — until tonight.” Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital, one of the early Trump supporters in the tech world, foresaw a “Renaissance,” writing that it was “time to build.” On Wednesday, he added that “Woke is dead.” Over in the crypto space, where major investors bet on a Trump administration that would take a lax approach to regulating decentralized currencies, the mood was similarly upbeat. Bitcoin billionaire Cameron Winklevoss congratulated the “persistent” Trump and marveled, “Imagine how much we are going to accomplish in the next 4 years now that the crypto industry won’t be hemorrhaging $ billions on legal fees fighting the SEC and instead investing this money into building the future of money.” His twin brother, Tyler Winklevoss, reshared both comments and on Wednesday observed, “Crypto just became a bipartisan issue overnight. Well done crypto army.”
Several billionaire tech CEOs who did not explicitly align themselves with the Trump campaign nonetheless offered friendly remarks on the occasion of his historic win. Among them was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, also owner of the Washington Post and widely criticized for killing the newspaper’s endorsement of Harris. (The paper issued no endorsement, angering staff and causing a quarter of a million readers to cancel their subscriptions.) “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos posted on X, which he had not used since writing in July that Trump had “showed tremendous grace and courage” when fired on by a would-be assassin at a Pennsylvania rally. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing [Trump] all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” The Post‘s staff union has not yet addressed Bezos’ remark and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, and Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, both extended their own well wishes after an election season in which they remained effectively neutral. On X, Altman posted, “congrats to President Trump. I wish for his huge success in the job.” On Meta’s Threads platform, Zuckerberg gave Trump kudos and looked to the future: “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” he wrote. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” Both men had expressed positive sentiments after Trump survived the July assassination attempt and have gone to great lengths to lobby Washington on behalf of their companies. In a book Trump published in September, the GOP nominee threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life, blaming him in part for the supposed rigging of the 2020 election (which was not stolen). But the relationship between Trump and Zuckerberg has since warmed, with Trump saying in October that he likes the Facebook founder “much better” than he used to because he had kept out of the 2024 race.
Finally, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, complimented Trump on a “decisive victory” on X, sounding an optimistic note: “We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone,” he wrote. Pichai reportedly had a friendly call with Trump in the closing days of the campaign.
While Democrats set about assigning blame for the losses suffered by Harris and other candidates and liberal measures on ballots around the country, at least one person argued that a powerful class of elites was most responsible for carrying Trump and his ilk into office. That would be Vivian Wilson, daughter of Musk, who legally changed her name and gender in 2022 with the aim of severing all ties to her father. The estrangement, Musk has said, led to his rightward political shift on transgender identity and other culture war issues, inspiring his fight against what he calls the “woke mind virus.”
“‘Blame this demographic, blame that demographic,'” Wilson wrote on her Threads account. “No. Blame the fucking politicians and oligarchs who caused this to happen. Direct your anger towards them.”
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