Sorry Democrats, There Are No "Good Billionaires"

You can't compromise on class war

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The DNC elected its new leader on February 1st. The long-time Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was appointed by secret ballot and will now be the party figurehead, replacing former coal lobbyist and failed South Carolina Senate candidate Jaime Harrison. While the federal government is effectively being ruled by fiat by one unelected billionaire in Elon Musk, Martin was recently quoted as saying “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”.

Find the “good billionaire”

If you were searching for any proof that Democrats have learned a lesson from their recent historic loss, you wouldn’t find it here. Like everything else, on the issue of billionaires Democrats are once again trying to find a way to split the baby. While the party is experiencing a real working class dealignment, the allure of that sweet, sweet billionaire cash is far too big to pass up. Democrats love their “good billionaires”. Kamala Harris even went as far as to send billionaire Mark Cuban to stump for her during her run for president. Cuban, who recently vocally supported the DOGE layoffs of masses of public sector workers on Twitter, is one of the good guys according to Dems.

There is, of course, no such thing as a “good billionaire”. The mere existence of billionaires is emblematic of a deep rot in society. Worse, we are fast approaching the minting of our first trillionaire, something that a healthy system could never countenance. In the last decade alone, billionaire wealth doubled, and now sits at around $14 trillion. The wealth growth of the top billionaires is even more egregious. From 2012 to 2025, Elon Musk’s wealth grew from $2 billion to $449 billion, Jeff Bezos from $18 billion to $245 billion. Mark Zuckerberg from $44 billion to $217 billion. To say this is unsustainable is an understatement. The wealth hoarded by just a couple thousand billionaires is now greater than the economies of many large countries.

At the same time, working class despair is growing rapidly as the basics of life become more and more out of reach. Homelessness in the United States is skyrocketing and according to a new study from LISEP, the percent of the labor force who are either unemployed, unable to find anything but part-time work, or make less than $25,000 a year is 23.7%. This is no coincidence. According to Oxfam “The richest 1% grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population”. Put another way, twice as much wealth was stolen from the working class by the 1% than was distributed back to them.

This extreme wealth hoarding gives billionaires the kinds of power that used to be reserved for kings. They command the markets, hold monopoly power over industries, and even have direct control over what laws pass Congress. In fact, a study by Princeton found that public opinion has virtually zero impact over which laws are passed, while economic elites have a substantial impact on policy. The cycle works like this: the rich buy our politicians, the politicians pass laws that benefit the rich, the rich reward politicians with more donations and primary spending to keep their investments in office, rinse and repeat. Despite the attempt by Democrats to differentiate between “good” and “bad” billionaires, between oligarchs and “bro-ligarchs”, everyone in the billionaire class is a thief. And the Democratic Party is just as wedded to these parasites as the Republicans. In fact, Kamala Harris had more billionaire donors than Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Even Elon Musk was the Dems golden boy right up until he was appointed unofficial co-president to Donald Trump. Democrats had no problem letting him help legislate on tech, handing him billions in government contracts, inviting him to the White House. The Billionaire Problem is utterly bipartisan.

Art Young, Good Morning, September - October 1920

One does not simply earn a billion dollars through hard work. Meritocracy is a myth created to trick the working class into feeling like they are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires whose ship will one day come in. The guy who digs ditches in your home town works harder than every billionaire on earth. The lives of the ultra-rich are only made possible by stealing the value of your labor. They create nothing of their own. They are a money vacuum that sucks up what is produced by the working class and uses that capital to expand their influence and their ownership, thereby finding more and more laborers to exploit, and further monopolizing markets. Every dollar of billionaire profit is a dollar taken out of the hands of the people who create the wealth. Not only do these billionaires own the means of production, they own our politicians and the media. This effectively gives them total control over what news the public sees and what laws our legislators write.

Billionaires know they are just a tiny minority, so in order to ensure that the public does not turn against them they spend a lot of time creating propaganda to convince the masses that the existence of a parasitic moneyed class is good, actually. They create think tanks tasked with producing “research” that supports the idea that tax cuts, austerity, and the free market are a net benefit to society. They form lobbying and advocacy groups that push pro-big business policy to our legislators. They own newspapers and tv channels that filter current events through the lens of what benefits the capitalist class. They form astroturf orgs that create the illusion that people love their private health insurance. They even develop elaborate (mostly false) back stories about how they started with nothing and became ultra-rich through their own grit and determination. They need you to believe they earned that money and that one day you, too, could become a billionaire. You just have to keep your head down and your nose to the grindstone.

One of the most insidious ways billionaires launder their reputation is through philanthropy. From as far back as Rockefeller and Carnegie, philanthropy has been a powerful tool to convince the public that massive wealth inequality wasn’t a problem because the benevolent rich will make up the difference. They not only launder their public reputation through charity, the act of philanthropy itself is a ruse that works to shield the public from the need for systemic changes, like higher taxes on the rich (i.e. “If Bill Gates didn’t exist then who would cure malaria?”). Instead of making sure wealth is distributed fairly, and that government provides a social safety net that gives some semblance of stability to workers, society can tolerate wealth disparity so long as these divine benefactors contribute some share of their largesse to the plights created by their existence. The wealthy, instead of being treated as a root cause, becomes the solution to our societal problems. With the added benefit of us not chasing them through town with our torches and pitchforks.

The reason we see the ultra rich, who for many decades were content to collect their buckets of money and live away from the rabble, playing a more public-facing role in society, is because the amount of leverage and control they are able to exert over all aspects of our lives is now approaching total. Not content to pull the strings behind the scenes, many of them now believe themselves to be divinely appointed to take center stage and be worshipped. To decide the direction of humanity itself. Our titans of industry are no longer the owners of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, they are Silicon Valley nerds who got very rich very fast through tech, and their influence is everywhere.

As the consequences of endless growth and capital extraction are starting to manifest through climate change, increasing economic crisis, and monopolization, many of these new billionaires have given up on the concept of even limited democracy and want to make sure that after the collapse, they are in charge of the system that replaces this one. Curtis Yarvin, described as the “house political philosopher” of the Peter Thiel universe of technofascist billionaires even proposed a solution to the problem of unproductive people in his future tech utopia: “convert them into biodiesel”. While Thiel is a Republican megadonor, his co-founder Alex Karp at Palantir - a Silicon Valley defense contracting company that has openly admitted to killing people - endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024. The terrifying future those in this cohort have envisioned for us is evidence the billionaire class knows that their parasitism has sown the seeds of their own destruction, but they would rather be king of the ashes than give a single dollar back to the working class.

While Democrats warn of the “bro-ligarchs” we have already been living under oligarchy, or even plutocracy, for quite some time. This is an inevitable outcome of capitalism. Under our system, both parties are parties of capitalist rule. Democrats cannot work for the “good billionaires” and simultaneously serve workers. The Democratic Party’s attempt to try to be the party of both the workers and capital has failed repeatedly because the interests of these groups is diametrically opposed. Democrats are not a weak, flaccid, feckless party by accident. They are, in fact, quite useful to the capitalist class. They have been willing participants in the mass transfer of wealth out of our hands and into the hands of the few time and time again. The real delusion is expecting them to do anything else.

While not all billionaires envision technofuturist torture devices for the bulk of humanity, every single one of them exists at the expense of the rest of us. Literally. Every single one is not just a policy failure but a consequence of the system itself. The Democratic Party can try to pretend there’s a fundamental difference between their billionaires and Trump’s, but the differences are merely window dressing on a class of people who can only exist by exploiting our own. The billionaires know they are in a class war. Mark Cuban will always side with his fellow rich on either side of the aisle before any one of us. In fact, Cuban spent a lot of time lobbying against FTC chair Lina Khan during Harris’ presidential run, because her pesky antitrust enforcement, while good for workers, is bad for business. He knows, like all billionaires know, that class is the determinative identity, not political party. Likewise, Democrats will always protect capital over their voters. It’s simply what they exist to do.

The bright side is that the new Trump administration has torn the mask off of something that successfully thrived just under the surface for decades. Elon Musk is in all of our faces, running roughshod over vital institutions, and making everyone aware exactly what class of people is the problem. If you hear any objections to this from other billionaires, you can rest assured their objection is not to the stripping of the administrative state for parts, it is to the way in which Musk is exposing them all.

Recent polling shows that the majority of people rightly think billionaires have too much control in our society. While Musk makes a mockery of our flimsy institutions, of the uselessness of the Democratic Party, and of bourgeois democracy itself, we have an opportunity to use this catastrophe to agitate against the billionaires and the whole of the capitalist class. The persistent myth of the altruistic, aspirational billionaire is being dismantled - along with the whole of the state apparatus - before our eyes. Our rulers can only survive as long as we, the majority, do not perceive them as a threat. Once we are able to consolidate our class identity, we are unstoppable. We are the billions, they - the billionaires - are the very, very few.

The most difficult thing about building class consciousness is removing the veil that obscures our class relations so we can rediscover our common cause. With this crisis, like with every crisis, comes a chance to agitate the masses against those who would sooner destroy all life on earth than check their insatiable greed. Instead of looking to a party that is merely the other hand of capital, we must look to each other and decide if we are going to let the world fall apart for a temporary boost on the next earnings call. The situation is dire but as long as there is life there is hope. It is our duty as workers, as humans, to throw off our shackles and reclaim this world from the parasites who would tear it asunder.