A New Breed of American Oligarch

KEVIN MALONEY: What is the impact when such a small number of people control so much wealth? What is the domino effect politically, geopolitically, ethically, financially? These are some of the things that Casey Michel, the author of United States of Oligarchy. unpacks in his new book and what we discuss together on today's episode of Values & Interests. I hope you enjoy the conversation and let's get right into it.

Casey Michel, welcome to the Values & Interests podcast here at Carnegie Council. Thanks so much for joining us.

CASEY MICHEL: Thanks so much, Kevin. Happy to be here.

KEVIN MALONEY: You are the author of the new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy. We are going to get into that and more in terms of the current geopolitical situation, this intersection of kleptocracy, oligarchy, autocracy, and illiberal democracy today, but what we always like to start with on the Values & Interests podcast for our listeners is get a sense of who we are talking to beyond the professional, so maybe you can introduce yourself to our listeners and talk about you as a person and the value system you have cultivated over the years and how it might bridge to your current work at the Human Rights Foundation and as an author.

CASEY MICHEL: I would be happy to. My name is Casey Michel. I am an American author and journalist. My day job is as the head of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. I am also a fellow on corruption at the Center for International Policy. I have spent the last 12 or more years working and writing on the intersection of corruption and especially American policy both domestic and foreign. I have worked extensively in the past looking at how dirty money and questionable finance from dictatorships around the world has found its way into the United States.

My most recent book looks at how a small number of individuals have used a significant amount of their wealth to pry open American democracy for their own ends and effectively privatize American foreign policy in the process. I am sure we will talk about the details surrounding some of those individuals in a moment, Kevin.

You asked me about my own personal value system. I do not know if it is necessarily anything unique. It is about fairness, accountability, and, for as much as I am a Batman fan first and foremost, the phrase that comes to mind is, of course, the Superman quote, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Yes, that is perhaps a little Pollyannish, but I do think there are significant elements and truths to that as well because I certainly think we are living through an era in which you see the alternative to that, and it is not an era that I think has brought much benefit either to American interests or to the rest of us.

KEVIN MALONEY: Being in a similar age bracket, there is a projection of what America was, and there is a demarcation line for a lot of people, pre- and post-9/11, and there are books and academic papers, but life is not like that, not binary, ones and zeros in terms of when we became more or less corrupt. What I think was great from the book’s perspective is that you did an amazing job of tracing empirically the level of not only increase in wealth of individuals in the United States but the crossing of red lines, when you go from the Jack Welchs and other maybe previous robber barons from earlier in the century to a red line where we might be going against America’s interests in order to cultivate wealth. Maybe you can give a sense of the high-level framing of the book and then we can dig into some of the themes, but it was a great journey to understand that change and substantively how it is happening.

CASEY MICHEL: Of course, the book goes into far more detail about this, but there were three dynamics happening simultaneously that led us to where we are as a country in dealing with what I argue in the book is an “oligarchy” in the United States.

On the one hand is what you just mentioned, wealth inequality. We are now at greater levels of wealth inequality not only than we have seen in our lifetime but even greater than what we saw during the Gilded Age, which is what most folks think of when they think of a potential comparison to where we are now. That is one element, the wealth inequality.

Another element is the campaign finance regulations or lack thereof. Campaign finance regulations have crumbled not only in recent years but even going back decades, at least to the 1970s, but perhaps most especially with the Citizens United decision in 2010, making American politics and American campaigns open to the highest bidders, not only domestically but unfortunately increasingly from a foreign context as well.

The other element is the growth of the offshore finance sector, which is also something I have written extensively about, the explosion of things like anonymous shell companies, anonymous trusts, and other secrecy vehicles that allow actors both domestic and foreign to hide their money from anyone, whether an investigative journalist, tax authorities, the list goes on.

Those three pillars are not necessarily unique in and of themselves. They are to a greater magnitude than anything we have ever seen before in American history, but those three together have created a truly unprecedented situation in which a small number of individuals, the wealthiest among us, have been able to use their money for whatever it is they want in terms of domestic policy while also opening the doors for foreign and even adversarial actors abroad.

KEVIN MALONEY: You start off in the book making a surprising claim for a layperson, someone who is not in the oligarchy or kleptocracy studying or writing space, in that “oligarchy” has been this nebulous term both from a practical, applied perspective, but also from a research perspective, and you go all the way back to Aristotle and how he defines and thinks about it. I put two pins in the book in the beginning where you discussed Aristotle and then discussed how the normative environment almost gave permission to call Russian billionaires who were grabbing with both hands oligarchs but not those U.S. CEOs. I think that is an interesting relativistic point that we like to think about here at Carnegie Council.

Can you give my listeners a sense of how you think about oligarchy as a definitional exercise and how it has emerged and expanded within the U.S. consciousness publicly?

CASEY MICHEL: Kevin, I am very happy you picked up on those two points because before I was writing the book and then actually getting into it those were two definitions I thought I understood previously, and then sinking my teeth into the material I realized, Oh, I think I was actually incorrect. For many different reasons, but one of them was a figure who many I am sure are familiar with named Aristotle, who first popularized the term “oligarchy” a few thousand years ago, and as Aristotle saw it oligarchy is and can be what it literally means, what the root of the term is, which is “the rule of the few,” that small number overseeing any country, state, or nation. Yes, that can be an oligarchy itself.

Kevin, if you, I, and Terence, our producer, someday are running a country, that does not necessarily make an oligarchy because as Aristotle saw it, they also have to be the wealthiest individuals who are fewest in number. That is an oligarchy, when you have the few and the wealthy overseeing a country, nation, or state.

As Aristotle and some other recent scholars including Jeffrey Winters, who has done fantastic work on this—I want to make sure to mention him; he is at Northwestern University—highlighted, that wealth does not need to come from any kind of illicit, questionable, or suspect source. You just mentioned the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s and 2000s especially, and, yes, to an American ear that is what an oligarch is. If we close our eyes and picture an oligarch, it is a crooked or corrupt Russian businessman after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But as Winters and others have pointed out that is not necessarily an oligarchy because it does not matter where the wealth came from. It can be from underhanded privatization deals after the fall of the Soviet Union, or it can come from creating companies like Meta or Facebook or creating companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Starlink. It does not matter where the money came from. All that matters is the amount of that money relative to the rest of society and what those individuals are doing with that money in the political sphere, all of which is to say that is why we are dealing with an oligarchy in the United States of American in the 2020s.

KEVIN MALONEY: When we look at ethical frameworks here at the Council, we are constantly applying them over different areas, whether it is climate change, nuclear ethics, or the U.S. presidency. When I was reading the section of the book in terms of differentiating, “Well, it’s a social media company, but now it is undermining elections,” or the wealth produced by that is undermining elections.

The late great Dr. Joseph Nye from Harvard wrote a book called Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, and I have talked about it on the podcast before, but I was thinking about his three-dimensional ethical framework, which is not only means and consequences but also intentions behind it, and I was using his scorecard and then looking at the wealth accumulation that you laid out in the book. The scorecard does not score some people very well.

I think that gives us a pathway into talking through these oligarchic personalities and inflection points over the last ten years of U.S. foreign policy but also U.S. private sector activity, and you do a great job in picking these out. Maybe you can talk through what you saw as these big moments when they started to undermine some of the principles that we had come to know from a democracy or foreign policy perspective.

CASEY MICHEL: The genesis of this book, the moment when it crystalized as a topic of oligarchy and the stories therein, took place, as I am sure you and the listeners remember, was January 20, 2025, during Donald Trump’s second inauguration, when he was speaking at the U.S. Capitol. I am sure folks can perfectly well visualize this, when figures like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai at Google, and a number of others were there, lined up next to him.

It was a moment that encapsulated in a very real physical and visual sense what oligarchy looks like, what these figures had attempted to do in terms of supporting Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and beyond that what they were attempting to get from the presidency. It was one of those moments that comes maybe once in a generation, maybe once in a century, when you actually are able to see what an oligarchy can look like in real time.

That was certainly what crystalized the topic, the theme of oligarchy, and understanding how we got here, where we are, and where we are going, but there was an additional element. The subtitle of the book gestures at how many of these figures not only targeted American democracy for their own personal benefit but also opened doors for autocratic forces abroad—the Russias, Chinas, and Turkeys of the world.

What that means and how that is different from previous iterations of wealthy Americans and beyond that how that reframes our previous understanding—again, Kevin, you and I are basically the same age. I am sure you remember the early to mid-2010s, the Obama era, certainly by his second term, when many of these figures, Zuckerberg, Musk, and even Bezos were feted as these liberal darlings, American entrepreneurs who were serving American interests through their generosity and foresight.

Look how far we have come in ten years in the public perception, but what I tried to do in the book was look at how they were cultivating many of those same autocratic forces that would later take advantage of their relationships, most especially out of China, and how little that trickled into American consciousness in the 2010s. It was very interesting to revisit that relatively recent history to see what blinking red lights we missed. When Mark Zuckerberg is out there asking Xi Jinping to name his firstborn child, I would like to think that raised more red flags than it did, but here we are.

KEVIN MALONEY: I had not heard about that before I read it in the book, which basically says what you needed to say. You would think that would be a bigger story.

One of the things you mentioned that dovetails with what you just said but is also something we study a lot at the Council is what you call the “rhetorical mask,” and you talk about Elon Musk supporting Ukraine and then being inundated and worked from a Russian perspective and then him starting to basically spew disinformation and Russian talking points. You said the rhetorical mask kind of falls away.

If you go up a level for us, beyond rhetoric, we think about this as a “moral mask”—Hans Morgenthau talks about this—and you can add this on either end of the spectrum. You can have this performative moralism, overly liberalistic foreign policy, which is in and of itself a trap, and then you can have the amoralism, but everybody is always wearing a mask. From an ethics perspective, a lot of the judgment is a good-faith thing.

As you have shown, these CEOs when Obama was in office were singing a much different tune. Maybe you could expand a little on the rhetorical mask and how you thought about that as you wrote the book.

CASEY MICHEL: It’s a great question, because it is both a rhetorical mask as well as a kind of moral mask. You are finally gaining an insight into what is motivating these figures, these characters, these dynamics, and what that means for the rest of us, not least American democracy. Again, much of that mask slipped in January of 2025 when Donald Trump was not only ascendant but back in the White House itself, opening up all kinds of regulatory and financial opportunities, elements of corruption, etc.

To go back to a point I was making a moment ago, I looked at how some of these figures, whether Zuckerberg, Musk, or Pichai of Google, were cultivating governments like China and what they were saying out of the side of their mouths to one audience in the United States versus what they were saying out of the other side of their mouths to government officials in China itself.

You and I were talking off-mic about potential comparisons and contrasts between what we see now in terms of the current crop of American oligarchs and what we saw during the previous iteration, most especially during the Gilded Age with the robber barons and tycoons of that era. There are certainly plenty of commonalities despite the scope and scale. The dynamics of wealth inequality are very similar.

Maybe you were going to ask about this, Kevin, but I think it is relevant to bring up a figure like Andrew Carnegie himself, who has his own unique story and was able to accumulate great wealth for himself, but what he ended up doing toward the end of his career was not only deciding internally but then publicizing for readers both in the United States and elsewhere the need to give back to the society that allowed you to produce the great amount of wealth that had accumulated to those tycoons themselves at the end of the Gilded Age.

He wrote it and called it The Gospel of Wealth. To paraphrase, he said, “Those individuals who have that greatest wealth still attached to their name by the end of their lives without having given it away or returned it to the society that has allowed them to create such wealth, they die miserable men.”

There was an ethos, a “moral core,” for lack of a better term, that was attached to Andrew Carnegie. Not that everyone bought into it; there were still plenty of those who thought otherwise and even declined some of his financing at the time, but there is a very clear dividing line, and I am sure you picked up on this as well, between what an Andrew Carnegie of 1900, 1910, and 1915 was saying about his roles and responsibilities back to the United States and what the figures we have now are saying, whether a Musk, a Zuckerberg, a Bezos, a Pichai, or others. The difference, as far as I can tell, could not be starker or clearer, and it is one of those dynamics among a number of others that presents a clear dividing line from what we have now versus what we had then.

KEVIN MALONEY: We reckon with this a lot at Carnegie Council in terms of the legacy of Andrew Carnegie, and we do not want this to be an ethical carwash for Andrew today. I would highly recommend any of my listeners to read David Nasaw’s biography of Andrew Carnegie, which is just fantastic and quite forthcoming on his challenges and successes. I think you are absolutely right. There was an ethos. There was a “learn, earn, and return” framework, to go into The Gospel of Wealth.

It seems to be that the American oligarch of today is more malleable in terms of principles related to civilizationalism, freedom, or universality. These are big, big ideas that go back thousands of years and that we thought had a sense of, “Step up, let’s improve,” over the last hundred years, but as somebody who grew up in the 1990s for me there is definitely a whiplash effect morally in how I view the United States right now with the amount of income inequality and the willingness to be transactional with the Putins and Xis of the world.

In the book you talk about the new oligarchs who are willing to have those transactions, how they have opened the door, and the effects of that door opening. Maybe you could take my listeners through a few examples of the ones you feel have been really impactful over the last few years.

CASEY MICHEL: The one you just mentioned a moment ago, a figure like Elon Musk, I think we can talk about him for a few different reasons. One, you mentioned his relationship with Russia itself.

Initially, following the expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Musk was one of Ukraine’s biggest boosters. He was very supportive of Ukrainian efforts to beat back Russian troops wherever they were found in Ukraine, but as the months wound on—this was again one of the key differences—you could see this in real time based on his tweets. At that point he already owned Twitter—but he began to push not only pro-Russian talking points but even pro-Russian propaganda about the history of Ukraine and how things had led to the invasion itself.

As we now know, by the end of the summer, when the tide was beginning to turn in favor of the Ukrainians, Musk began clamping down on Ukrainian counteroffensive efforts. There is one infamous case where there was a Ukrainian naval drone they were sending to occupied Crimea. It was going to be this phenomenal, fantastic, amphibious assault on Russian holdings in Crimea, and Musk effectively nixed it. As he said, he was concerned about it escalating into World War III.

In the last few years there have been thousands of assaults on Crimea and we are still not in World War III, but leaving that to the side what we also now know is that the Russians specifically targeted Elon Musk, began cultivating him, and especially began cultivating his ego. This is another element that has come to the fore in the 2020s, these oligarchic individuals have egos that are, I was going to say “incomparable,” but maybe there are certain figures in the White House that may be able to compare in terms of the size, scope, and scale of their egos. That ego then gets in the way of not only what their own personal potential positions may be, but of course American interests themselves. That is one element, and Musk continues to allow Russia usage of his Starlink terminals for years thereafter.

The other element with Musk was and is his relationship with China, which is ongoing to this day. Musk is a supposed “free speech warrior,” as he says, and a supporter of a market economy, but has nonetheless taken advantage of his relationship with the Chinese government. In the 2010s he opened the biggest Tesla production facility in Shanghai, and until very recently with the SpaceX initial public offering, it was the health of Tesla that was the predominance of Elon Musk’s personal net worth. To break it down, Tesla opens its biggest facility and is reliant on remaining in the good graces of the Chinese government, and Musk’s personal net worth is reliant on the health of Tesla and therefore also reliant on remaining in the good graces of the Chinese Government.

You see this manifesting in all kinds of ways. One is publicly questioning what the Chinese government is or is not doing to the Uyghur population in Western China, downplaying the atrocities that have been reported there, to on the other hand offering and opening a conduit to the Trump administration with China, who view Musk as the primary gateway to pursuing policies that they want to see pursued. There is a moment I describe in the book in which Musk nearly obtained, for reasons that are still unclear, the American war games planning against a potential war with China in the Pacific. Again, it is unclear why he was about to obtain that, and, to his credit, President Trump nixed that by saying, “Why would we give a businessman with such deep business links to China those detailed plans?”

Those are two examples of the many detailed in the book. I think it is worth highlighting that we did not see this with Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Leland Stanford, that original crop of tycoons. They were not out there allying with the Kaiser’s government in Germany. They were not out there allying with the Spanish government during the Spanish-American War. This is a dynamic we have not seen before.

KEVIN MALONEY: Your point on the lack of humility is interesting. At the Council we often think about the spectrum between moral absolutism and moral relativism. We believe very strongly here in terms of universal values and related principles of action in foreign policy which reject this relativism. But in order to practice applied ethics you also need to be humble enough from a moral absolutism perspective to engage with other values, or else everyone lives in a silo.

I have been struck by how figures like Musk have managed to combine the worst of both of those two things into one social media account. They are so sure in the defense of the West and hubristic in terms of how they deliver that analysis. It is quite the moment from a Carnegie Council and ethics perspective to watch these people flaunt their influence, money, and power.

CASEY MICHEL: As you just mentioned a moment ago, transactionalism is at the heart of this, and it is the supposed defense of Western values that they claim to profess. Yet at the same time, whether it is Musk’s relationship with China or the intersection of that transactionalism which can lead directly to the renewal of outright territorial aggrandizement or imperialism as we have seen in places like Greenland, which can shatter a Western alliance and which completely pushes up against or undercuts any of those claims to be supporting or respecting Western values. This is not even talking about the support for basic constitutional rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the list goes on. The core as you mention is an amoral, valueless approach that results purely in transactionalism, which all too often simply benefits those who are pursuing the policies rather than the rest of us.

KEVIN MALONEY: You mentioned Greenland, and one of the more interesting parts of the book from my perspective, being at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, is this figure we all know, Jared Kushner. Thinking about what has happened in the last two years and the gutting of the civil service in Washington and at the same the ascendency of this “Swiss army knife” of a dealmaker, an unelected, un-overseeable diplomat who is in Russia in one minute, in Ukraine in another, and Gaza the next. Tell us about this character who has emerged, the power that he now wields, and his approach to the United States being “for sale,” for lack of a better term.

CASEY MICHEL: No, I think that is the perfectly appropriate term. Jared Kushner, as I am sure everyone is aware, is President Trump’s son-in-law, married to Ivanka Trump. During Trump’s first term, Jared Kushner oversaw Middle East policy despite the lack of any regional expertise. He did not speak any of the local languages and barely understood any of the local dynamics, and as we now know was specifically targeted by a number of governments and regimes in the region for that gullibility and for their ability to “buy him off,” for lack of a better term.

After Donald Trump leaves the White House in 2021, Jared Kushner starts a new private investment firm, which opens the door for billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, a number of autocratic governments, to come in and in the process eventually make Jared Kushner a billionaire unto himself. Then, when Donald Trump returns to the White House, initially Kushner downplays any involvement and says he will not play any role in the administration, but as 2025 proceeds he comes back in from the cold and is once more appointed to oversee everything from Israel and Gaza policy to Russia and Ukraine policy to the failed negotiations that led directly to the ongoing Iran war.

This is Jared Kushner transforming into the most important diplomat in 21st-century America and doing so without any official role and therefore, as he says, not being subject to any financial transparency, all the while still managing billions of dollars from his foreign clientele. It is, for lack of a better term, a clear example of corruption at a level we have not seen in terms of American diplomatic history, and it is something we are still dealing with here in the middle of 2026.

KEVIN MALONEY: In the book you make a distinction that for a while we had these autocratic regimes and their oligarchs and interests coming to the United States and attempting to understand our market and getting access, but a switch has flipped and now you have the cultivation of oligarchic wealth in the United States looking for partners in autocratic countries to wash their money and set up shell corporations. That is such an interesting dynamic from the soul of a country perspective but also from a what is palatable or acceptable from a capitalism and political perspective. Maybe you could walk the listeners through how that turn happened and what it looks like today.

CASEY MICHEL: It is funny that you mention capitalism, because what an oligarchy is at the end of the day is a monopolistic crony capitalism. It is not market liberalism, it is not an open economy, and it is certainly not something that leads to the free and fair trade practices that can elevate an entire society. It is something that benefits again only those at the top, whether in the public or private sector, to the detriment of the rest of us.

To get back to the term you mentioned earlier, this kind of transactionalism, I am so happy you highlighted that point. I don’t know how effectively I did in the book, but there was this switch that flipped in early 2025. Where it was previously foreign autocratic regimes looking to the United States for laundering opportunities but also lessons, tools, and tactics for how to hide their money to entrench their regimes, and now what we see is the inverse of that with these figures looking abroad for support, for advice, and for guidance on how to, on the one hand, strangle a democracy and on the other hand protect their own personal wealth and dissolve any kinds of lines that may have once existed between public and private interests or their interests and American interests.

Again, there is a soullessness to this. If the only thing that matters at the end of the day is the bottom line for these individuals, if the only thing that matters is their personal net worth and how they are able to use that to accrue power, that is a valueless society. That is a society in which democracy is constantly and consistently at risk, and that necessitates, calls for, and highlights that much more the need to have a value-based approach. Any society has to be about more than just what you are making and what you are using that money for in the political system.

KEVIN MALONEY: To build on what you said—and this is something I am looking at through my own research, so I am in it from a values perspective—from my perspective it is not almost valueless but is a replacement or gaslighting around certain values in that you go from public service to transactionalism, you go from serving the public or being in government to basically wealth accumulation being both a virtuous thing and an end goal simultaneously.

There is definitely a battle for the soul of that happening right now at the public level in the United States. Again, life is not binary, and I do not think one is going to come out on top necessarily, but as you laid out in the book the normative winds have shifted significantly in terms of what is acceptable, palatable, the lack of shame, and the blatant irony in some of the things that are happening right now. The winds have shifted, you know that, and in this book you have mapped it, so thank you so much for doing that.

CASEY MICHEL: Thanks, Kevin. The thing that maybe surprises me, and maybe I should not be surprised by it, is that many of these figures—and as you said, there is a shamelessness to it—have a conviction that they will simply not only get away with everything they have gotten away with but continue to do so moving forward and that there will not be a blowback, pressure building, or some kind of movement or energy or even a political figure, to take an example, like Teddy Roosevelt toward the end of the Gilded Age and the beginning of the Progressive Era, that there simply will not be that.

I will speak frankly. It is quite the gamble they are taking in assuming that the American populace will not simply stand up and push back or will simply abide all of this. As an American speaking to an American and having been surrounded by Americans for almost my entire life, that strikes me as folly. That strikes me as something that Americans will not stand for whether it is now or in the near future. It is quite the risk that these figures are taking.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think from a hubris perspective extreme wealth really rewrites you psychologically. For my listeners, as you mentioned, Teddy Roosevelt was called a “traitor to his class” because he went after these people. We will see if the pendulum swings back.

Maybe we can end on that in terms of how to think hopefully about this moment or what mechanisms might exist from a policy or citizenship perspective to start to push back on this a little bit. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, and maybe we can end on a slightly more positive note.

CASEY MICHEL: I am always happy to end any conversation about this on an optimistic note. The good news is that these figures have risen and we find ourselves in the position we are now in as a nation in large part because of policy decisions that were taken by legislators both current and previous. These were policy decisions and these are now the policy outcomes. These are not things that are eternal. These are not things that come from heaven on high. They are things that can and should be changed moving forward.

So, whether it is about increased or new forms of taxation, specifically targeting some of these figures—a tactic that has worked in previous iterations of oligarchy, and I am sure it would work once more—whether it is about ending anonymous financial secrecy vehicles, ending anonymous shell companies, ending the kind of anonymous perpetual trusts that we have seen take root, and of course campaign finance. American campaign finance regulations are effectively an oxymoron at this point, but that does not mean that has to be true forever. There are all kinds of limits, caps, and transparency requirements that are needed and that can be implemented by a future Congress in the United States that we absolutely need.

Policies got us into this position in many ways, and policies in many ways can get us out. The policies have to be enforced, there have to be investigations, and there has to be funding, but there are policy solutions there and available.

KEVIN MALONEY: We could go on forever, but that is a great point to end on. If our listeners want to know more about the anecdotes, stories, and investigations, definitely pick up the book. I will link to it when we put up this episode on Carnegiecouncil.org and on YouTube, et cetera.

Casey, thank you so much for coming on today with me, and we will see you back in person at the Council soon.

CASEY MICHEL: Thank you so much, Kevin.