The Billionaire Gang of Four behind Trump

Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Timothy Mellon, and Elon Musk

The Billionaire Gang of Four behind Trump:

Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Timothy Mellon, and Elon Musk

(Chapter Four of Emanuel’s book “The Man who stole America”

Behind the politicians who appear on television, who are marketed for their entertainment value and encouraged by coaches and message shapers to dwell on set themes, there is a hidden cabinet of billionaires behind Donald Trump. Most of the billionaires who hope that Donald Trump will help them to protect their assets and will massively increase their domination of the economy, and all aspects of American society, do not have a specific loyalty to Donald Trump. They may have given money to Kamala Harris, or perhaps they spread their money around—or gave through third parties.

But there is a core of around 12 multibillionaires who have taken an aggressive approach to politics that is unprecedented in American society and that reveals a new political culture in Washington DC, and more importantly a new power structure. They backed Trump because they want to run the government themselves, without any bureaucrats in the way.

This group of billionaires, including Marc Andreessen, Harold Hamm, Timothy Mellon, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, Dana White, Jeffrey Yass, Howard Lutnick, John Paulson, Charles Kushner, Scott Bessent, Miriam Adelson, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon (and others) are no longer hiding behind trusts and manipulating politics through their agents and advisors, they have taken over the actual administration of government itself. The move seems rather foolhardy, and there are many billionaires who clearly prefer to lurk in the shadows and avoid such visibility. But this shift in policy is significant.

There are several reasons for this radical shift. First, the concentration of wealth in the United States has increased so radically over the last decade, and two decades, that it is no longer the same country. There is a real political need for a government, and more importantly, a merger of government and corporations, that focuses on the needs of billionaires because the billionaires are that important a part of the economy. That shift means that the journalism, from Forbes Magazine, has been restructured so as to glorify the rich, and above all the super-rich, including efforts to push billionaires in movies, songs, books, TV reports and elsewhere as geniuses, entrepreneurs, men of deep wisdom and understanding who have been divinely selected to rule. Much of that propaganda has in turn encouraged billionaires and their agents to drink the Kool-Aid, to think that they are in fact geniuses and that they should be running the show.

Sheldon Adelson, the man who made Trump president the first time, summed it up in his famous quote, “I don’t listen to a critic who is not rich, because I say, ‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ I send these guys embroidered ‘Sheldon Adelson’ towels with a handwritten letter that says, ‘This is for you to wipe the egg off your face when you come to realize how wrong you’ve been.’ ”

The newly empowered billionaires, at least at the start of the Trump administration, think they have a divine right to rule and they are anxious to start cutting out the middle man. That theme of “cutting out the middle man” is popular today among Trump’s business supporters. They want to get rid of government officials through the DOGE program, and replace them with AI, or contract everything out to multinational IT firms. They want to reduce the political parties to just PR firms to promote material developed by media experts. No more citizens, or government officials, or experts to play a role in this new kingdom come. So one can see that in order to realize this nation “for the billionaires, by the billionaires, and of the billionaires,” you would need first to have billionaires running the show to make sure that no intellectuals or politicians can sneak in to try and protect the bureaucrats, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors and the other members of the professional class who are in fact the enemy of the billionaires (from a billionaire perspective). That means also restructuring the entire government, and education and journalism so that it accurately reflects the new power dynamics in which billionaires have absolute authority and are beyond accountability and ordinary citizens are serfs.

Another historical shift behind this new form of politics was the Supreme Court Citizen’s “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” ruling of 2010 that held that “freedom of speech” meant that the rich and powerful corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to support political campaigns—going far beyond what is allowed in other countries.

The result was the rise of the PAC (political action committee) or Super PAC (a larger and more broadly defined PAC which take in billions of dollars from banks, corporations and billionaire families to push issues, and even policies linked to specific candidates and political parties. There is no limit to how many millions of dollars can be contributed to the Super PACs and much money is donated in a manner that makes it difficult to trace its source. Today it is impossible to run for federal office without substantial funding from PACs and they are accepted as a reality in politics—almost no one campaigns for office these days on a platform hostile to this legalized bribery of politicians.

The Terrarium Economy

The decision of the billionaires to actually run the United States directly (and they have similar plans for Canada, Britain, Germany and France) means that we have a chance to actually see how they try to administer.

There is a “gang of four” among the billionaires who have poured enormous amounts of money into the Trump campaign, surpassing anything ever seen in history, and essentially ostentatiously showing the world that they can buy the presidency, bribe the president and do so with complete immunity. The four billionaires are Miriam Adelson (widow of Sheldon Adelson), Peter Thiel, Timothy Mellon, and Elon Musk. Although Elon Musk has supposedly retired from the administration, this seems to be merely a show for the public as he and his “PayPal Mafia” friends are intimately involved in policy. Billionaires are out front, on TV, in meetings, showing contempt for anyone who is not rich, and perpetuating the myth that one becomes a billionaire through hard work and genius, not deep criminality.

This Trump administration of, by and for the billionaires, is not conservative in any sense, but rather the complete overthrow of government as we know it and its replacement with an IT corporate/banking goliath that serves their specific needs.

The CEO of the gang of four is the smartest and most ambitious of all the next generation of billionaires, Peter Thiel. Although Thiel claimed during the campaign that he did not support any candidate, and there are no public records of large donations by Thiel to Trump’s Super PACs, he contributed large amounts to the Republican Party and most likely gave money on the same scale as the other billionaires to the Trump campaign through indirect means. He has used devious means to fund political campaigns before and Thiel was the plotter who brough together this group of billionaires to back Trump this time—and he was the only major technology billionaire to back Trump early on in 2016.

Peter Thiel’s support for Trump, and his effort to use the Trump administration to vastly expand his own shadow empire, is not an emotional response to immigration, or a part of a Christian nationalist movement—but an extremely coldly calculated strategy to vastly increase his own economic and political power. He wants to use his private intelligence firm Palantir, his private equity firm Founders Fund, and his weaponized AI, drones and robots firm Anduril to take over the entire government of the United States, and the entire world if possible.

Born in Germany, raised in South Africa in a highly racist environment, Thiel arrived in California for High School and attended Stanford University. Thiel has always been a secretive, strategic thinker who also makes explicit political statements that are controversial only when it serves his purposes. He was not social, but deeply engaged in the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons, and taken with J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series. He imagines himself as the dark hidden master of the universe who plots to conquer his opponents using magic. That mentality is unchanged. Thiel named his companies after terms from the Lord of the Rings; for example, his private intelligence firm is named Palantir after the magic seeing stones in Lord of the Rings, and his Mithril Capital Management, the venture fund he used to create JD Vance as a political figure, is named after the rare metal mined by dwarves in Lord of the Rings—interestingly, rare earth elements would become the center of global conquest during the Trump term.

If Trump views politics like real estate and sees every political move, or public statement as the equivalent of purchasing undervalued land and then raising its value through promotion and development, Thiel sees politics as a long game of chess in which outwitting and undermining the opponent by creating various complex booby traps and false leads is the name of the game. He was a chess master in high school and he looks on all political strategy with tremendous detachment and calculation.

Thiel rose to tremendous political power after the 9.11 incident by using the new emphasis on technology, computers, tracking and intelligence to build his own unaccountable empire in which supercomputers were used to run facial recognition and geofencing programs related to immigration, administer prisons, run police departments, but also to take over military and intelligence operations, finance, cryptocurrencies, and banks. He sees the restructuring of government, money and education a single project that will allow him to take complete control of the United States and the world. There is no limit to the global ambitions of Thiel and unlike Trump, he is not simply interested in making himself and his family rich, and famous, but in something far greater.

Thiel had already made a considerable fortune from his contracts for information processing for the CIA when a political crisis erupted under the Bush administration that gave him an unprecedented opportunity. In February, 2003, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the site for the most egregious cooperation between multinational banks and corporations and the military and intelligence, launched the “total information awareness” program that was intended to track all information about all citizens for intelligence and the military for the purposes of national security. The true intention of this program to establish a new form of totalitarian governance was immediately obvious and that backlash in an America which had still a partially functional government, was significant. Within six months this program was shut down and all intelligence officials involved distanced themselves from it.

Behind the scenes, however, Navy Admiral John Poindexter who had been appointed as head of the Total Information Awareness Program, approached Peter Thiel and other IT millionaires who had massive classified contracts with DARPA about continuing the Total Information Awareness Program in complete secrecy, this time run by unaccountable private corporations, not government intelligence which was subject to some loose regulation. It was a fatal turning point in American history. At the very moment that the Bush administration started to backtrack, and prepared to end TIA, Thiel incorporated Palantir and started bidding for massive intelligence and immigration contracts, many from the newly created Department of Homeland Security which also concentrated power in the hands of IT firms.

When Trump became president with Thiel’s assistance and massive financial support in 2016, Thiel pushed the privatization of intelligence and the military far beyond what Dick Cheney had ever done, securing massive open-ended contracts for his firm Palantir and his friends in Silicon Valley. Government functions in the CIA, Homeland Security, immigration, ICE, Department of Energy and Department of Defense were outsourced to Palantir (and other firms like Booz Allen Hamilton and MITRE) on a massive scale. Thiel also bribed former intelligence officials by offering them well paid positions in his firm, and the firms of other American and Israeli firms. Of course, such moves were not entirely new, but they were undertaken by Thiel not as a way to make more money, but as a way to completely transform the very nature of government and society.

That vision is best expressed in Thiel’s book “Zero to One” which is immensely popular with his fans in Silicon Valley and the far-right political realm.

Thiel rejected the standard arguments that capitalism was good because it promotes competition and free markets which assure a Darwinian evolution and give consumers choices. He suggests that it is the Nietzschean “superman,” the genius of innovation and entrepreneurship, who should be unfettered in his drive for complete economic and political control and allowed to do whatever he wants. Democracy, and concern for the rights of citizens, Thiel argues, is a big mistake. Instead, we should be led by business geniuses who look for some service or system that does not exist (the zero) and then after they create it, then control 100% of the market for this service (the one) that they have invented. Monopolies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Palantir are justified for Thiel and making them all-powerful is the only way to make progress for Thiel.

The integration of American and Israeli intelligence, especially private intelligence, during the first Trump administration was a critical part of Thiel’s plan to seize effective control of the United States. Thiel used his Founders’ Fund, a multinational private equity firm to fund numerous startups in Israel, many companies, like Carbyne 911, founded by Israeli intelligence officers, were then granted contracts for both homeland security and ICE surveillance, and chances to bid for military and intelligence contracts, and subcontracts with a major political advantage. By the end of the Trump administration Israeli private intelligence had its fingers in just about every aspect of security for the Federal government, and also the administration of prisons, the training of local police, the camps where immigrants are detained, and the security cameras at shopping malls. Although Palantir did not become a household name like Amazon or Google, or Homeland Security, it often was the hidden force behind those names.

Thiel also employed crisis, starting with 9.11, but extending to school shootings, public health emergencies, hyped up crime waves, accusations of violence by immigrants as an opportunity to gain new contracts for increasingly severe and unaccountable surveillance. Palantir made a fortune from its controversial contract work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security, in which software developed by Palantir guides immigration raids and arrests of supposed illegal aliens in a manner that takes humans out of the process and makes the government unaccountable.

The process has led to a feudal system within the federal government wherein police, infrastructure security, electricity, information and cyber security, and healthcare are controlled by a handful of IT contractors which are controlled by private equity and effectively unaccountable to the people because a new generation of judges have been installed, with massive donations from multinational corporations who take the libertarian view that government has no right to regulate business, but is free to imprison citizens for minor offenses if privatized police departments and prisons can make money.

Thiel has been able to increase his political control quickly, allowing his Palantir to steal defense contractors from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin because he was able to combine seamless integration of private intelligence spying, lobbying and influence buying, cooperation with Israeli intelligence, Israeli private finance and Israeli high tech, and radical innovations in the nature of finance and money. That is to say that Thiel was not only trying to win the money game, he was trying to redefine what money is and how its value is set. Thiel imbedded Palantir in both government agencies and the financial institutions that they were supposed to regulate, and in companies they were investing in. He created overlapping systems for tracking financial transactions within Palantir which gave him inside knowledge that no one else had. It would not be an exaggeration to say that although Thiel supposedly has about 13 billion dollars in assets, his companies, and his loyal associates, control directly through software trillions of dollars through their software programs for the recording, transfer, and exchange of currencies around the world. The name on the book cover may be Bank of America, Boeing, Google, Amazon, or BlackRock, but peer under the hood and you will find Palantir, or Palantir related companies managing the system.

Thiel launched this battle to control money itself in 1998 when he founded Paypal and along with a handful of IT “geniuses” now billionaires known as the “PayPal Mafia” made billions of dollars by offering a service that allowed the user to send money around the world in a convenient manner without having to fill out pages of documents at the bank, or pay enormous fees. But the truth that has yet to be acknowledged is that it was impossible to set up such a system, a monopoly on global money transfer, without bribing thousands of government officials and government institutions in hundreds of countries around the world. Although Thiel left PayPal after making his first billions there, he quickly moved into the world of crypto currencies which he and his supporters intend to use to destroy national currencies and create a digital format-currency run by corporations and banks around the world whose value can be changed in an opaque manner by the companies, and for which every transaction can be tracked and traced, and for which the institution that manages the currency, or the government, can shut off the access to money of the citizen at any time, or even subtract from the bank account of the citizen fines, or expenses without permission. Thiel extended his control of crypto currencies through the development of new financial monitoring systems that took advantage of new technologies for the creation of value and the conduct of financial transactions. He employed, most likely his private intelligence network to bribe and intimidate all necessary to be successful. Thus, by the changing the rules, instead of playing by them, Thiel has become a competitor with Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, or even BlackRock and Vanguard. He intends to push crypto currency while at the same time attacking the value of the US dollar issued by the Federal Reserve which is controlled by major private banks.

A large factor in the inroads made by Palantir and other military contractors tied to Thiel in obtaining defense contracts from the Pentagon is the combination of sophisticated bribery and extortion achieved by using the hard core operations of intelligence previously reserved for use abroad at home. Equally importantly. Thiel has promoted artificial intelligence as a necessary, and inevitable, shift that must take place in government claiming, along with his closest collaborators Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen, and Stephen Feinberg, that he alone is capable of employing artificial intelligence in an ethical manner.

The vague term artificial intelligence means for Thiel and his supporters that there are computers that are wiser and smarter than any human and that the judgments of those computers whether in policy, in science, or in war have absolute authority and cannot be disputed or questioned by ordinary people. The fact of the matter is that although super computers can be helpful tools for humans, ultimately decisions are made by humans and to pretend that computers themselves make decisions allows the oligarchs to dress up their self-interest and quest for power in the garb of technology. If billionaires secretly determine that whole populations must die, and then artificial intelligence presents this order as a fact calculated scientifically and objectively by supercomputers, what resistance to such a dictatorship will be possible?

Pushing AI as a solution to all social, economic and systematic problems is a central part of Thiel’s strategy and he intends to do so first through DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) the public-private unaccountable organization being set up by Thiel’s business partner Elon Musk and his other business partner turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy. The point of DOGE will be to replace government officials and scientific experts with AI controlled by massive multinational for-profit corporations like Google, Microsoft, Open AI, Meta, Oracle, and Amazon.

The common thread running through all these efforts is the systematic expansion of surveillance capabilities through the merger of private technology, government agencies, private finance, and military and security systems. Thiel’s influence during the Trump administration appears focused on creating comprehensive monitoring systems that blur the lines between corporate and state power, while operating under the guise of emergency response and national security. We can see this process starting already in the response to the California fires that have created a massive crisis. As the American capitalist J. P. Morgan wrote, “in politics there are always two reasons. A good reason and then a real reason.”

Elon Musk

Peter Thiel’s old friend, occasional rival, and consistent business partner Elon Musk is a key figure in the gang of four, and he was the central spokesman for the destruction of government and civil society in the name of technological advancement in the United States at the beginning of the Trump administration using the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to destroy the Federal government. Hundreds of millions have been spent to promote Musk as a defender of free speech, choosing a few high-profile cases where he made a statement that was then broadcast around the world over and over again. As CEO at Space X and Twitter he has done everything in his power to end free speech and to promote corporate fascism.

Musk appeared beside Trump during the campaign dressed entirely in black, looking like a sinister villain from a comic book. He referred to himself as what “dark MAGA,” promoting himself in videos as a super hero figure with Batman-like ambiguity—that he had a dark and evil power.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested that Elon Musk, who has never run for office, could be appointed as Speaker of the House in the House of Representatives when he opposed a bipartisan bill to avert a government shutdown. This promotion of Elon Musk as a hero figure who makes the constitution and governance itself irrelevant was very much a part of Trump bid to destroy government itself.

Musk runs around the world meeting heads of state as if he had his own country, and demands to be treated as a head of state. And then he took the unprecedented step of bringing his fascistic “dark MAGA” to Germany where he openly gave his support for AfG (Alternative for Germany) a far-right nationalistic party hostile to all immigration and committed to a massive military build up. Musk did so after making repeated attacks on German Prime Minster Olaf Scholz. His political comments about German politics, and Musk’s intervention in American politics on behalf of Donald Trump including massive donations to Trump’s Super PACs, and even a stunt of giving away one million dollars to random supporters of Trump, made Musk into a political figure with no precedent in American history. He was not running of office, or even trying to do so. But he meets heads of state and leading politicians as if he were a president himself.

Granted that Trump himself does not act like a president himself, Musk played an oversized role as head of DOGE, and he clearly did not see himself reporting to Trump within a government organization. Government is held in contempt by both Trump and Musk and Musk’s DOGE office was created to allow him to destroy government as he saw fit.

Elon Musk is a mystery who plays odd role in politics. It might be best to say that Elon Musk is a phenomenon, not a person. Just hear him speak on television and you will see that he speaks in broken sentences, making confused and poorly organized statements in a narcissistic way. Donald Trump is more articulate and seems to offer more meaningful statements than does Elon Musk.

We are told that Elon Musk is a business genius running multiple massive global business ventures involving complex technology and he has amassed a fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

But the doubts about who Musk really is are growing. Does he really have all that wealth and power, or is he rather the face for other players who are hiding behind him, happy to have a narcissist take their place on the public stage. He appears increasingly like an Jeffery Epstein character—an operator who also pretended he was a billionaire as part of a larger intelligence operation.

Regardless of whether or not Musk actually makes the decisions, while he was in the Trump administration, or since he left, his companies are at the center of the drive to transform the United States, and the entire world using technology. First there is Tesla, a company that is pushing electric cars, not public transportation or logical city planning as the solution to all environmental and energy problems. Tesla electric cars receive massive government subsidies but they are priced so as to be unaffordable for working people. They are designed in such a manner that it is impossible for citizens, or even mechanics to fix them locally. Moreover, Tesla cars are run with complex computer programs which the owner cannot alter or choose, and is updated constantly without permission by Tesla Incorporated. For all the cost of a Tesla, one cannot actually own one because one is constantly dependent on Tesla for parts, for software updates and for maintenance.

Moreover, Tesla is leading the charge towards autonomous automobiles which will be run by AI and further reduce the ability of citizens to control their own lives. Already these autonomous cars are being forced on us slowly, and at a future date they may be ruled to be the inevitable way humanity must go, with incentives given for adopting them at the cost of all human autonomy as decisions concerning travel will be made by AI.

Musk’s SpaceX is essentially the complete privatization of rockets and satellites that intends to make space the private property of billionaires who can do as they wish. SpaceX has taken over the launch of satellites and operates with no government oversights. Moreover Jared Issacman, a long-time friend of Musk pushing for the privatization of space, has taken over as head of NASA, and another Musk friend Brendan Carr is now head of the Federal Communications Commission that approves space launches and communications activities. In effect all parts of the Federal government that are supposed to regulate the use of space are now the property of SpaceX.

SpaceX runs Star Link and Star Shield, two sets of low-orbit communications and observation satellites that orbit the Earth collecting massive amounts of information that can be processed for the use of corporations, as well as for intelligence and the military, and that can be used for communications. Star Link is a commercial intelligence and communications and Star Shield is a secret program for the military and intelligence made up of 100 satellites for collecting intelligence and guiding missiles, drones and planes.

StarLink has almost 10,000 satellites in low orbit that can be used to spy on anyone at any time, and direct attacks by missiles, drones, airplanes or other weapons. Although the nations of the world have never given permission for this private company and the US Air Force and US Space Force to have this sort of global absolute power, although there are plans to increase the number of these satellites to 100,000 or more, while people are distracted by the stupid speeches of Donald Trump, the dangers are almost unknown to citizens.

X, formally known as Twitter, is a social media company that promotes Musk himself as a hero figure, and a small group of his far-right friends, but also is one of the only places that citizens can reach out to others as the destruction of postal service, and other forms of censorship break down the circulation of information. Musk has changed X completely by demanding payment in order to get a broad readership (otherwise one is not seen at all by others) but not giving those paying any rights to determine the format of the account they use-or any share of the immense profits from this monopoly.

Then there are more obscure companies associated with Elon Musk like Boring Company which drills tunnels deep beneath the Earth’s surface, often in complete secrecy, often as part of classified programs that parallel the privatization of space above by Star Link. Only a few minor tunnels drilled by Boring Company are known to the public, but granted the secretive efforts to use new drilling machines around the world to create the means to ship products, and also to move military equipment, in secret far beneath the surface, it is quite likely that Boring Company’s activities are far broader. We need only look at Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland to see the potential for such tunnels to radically transform transportation—and possibly military affairs as well.

Other companies like xAI which develops and promotes AI systems, Neuralink, which creates brain-computer interfaces, and other technology programs that Musk promotes are part of the strategy to take control of all aspects of human experience using an unaccountable massive supercomputer system.

Elon Musk’s role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was catastrophic for the United States. DOGE was not actually a government “department,” but a private consulting firm. Yet Musk and his hackers were given permission to fire everyone, to steal information and give it to private corporations and otherwise to destroy the nation. Creating a new department in the federal government would require the approval of Congress; Trump acted as if Congress does not exist.

Musk oversaw the destruction of existing government organizations for regulation and the maintenance of standards, for infrastructure and public health, for safety and environmental protection. He forced through the complete merger of the private and public sector so that there is literally no part of government that is not run by a corporation today.

The government of the United States was so weak and corrupt after many years of neglect that there were not that many left in government capable of real resistance to a billionaire whose intention is the destroy the functions of government. To some degree much of the United States federal government was already run largely by private corporations and government employees play the role of assigning contracts from the budgets passed by congress to different companies—there was little capacity in government to run the nation.

Two trillion dollars that Musk says he trimmed was not taken from the defense and intelligence budgets, or homeland security budgets, or any of the budgets related to the greatest waste of resources on earth. Musk’s intention is to further increase military spending and to militarize the American economy. Thus, the two trillion dollars must be cut from programs like healthcare for workers, like maintenance of basic infrastructure, education, and environmental protection that are essential to citizens. It will be cuts that will be painful and that will mean that there is no government there to regulate corporations as they exploit citizens for profit.

That was done by design by the so-called “conservatives” who were in fact paid by the rich to attack big government and bureaucrats, not because government was inefficient—in fact it is more efficient than corporations because there is less corruption and no demand to meet the short-term profit requirements of stock holders, but because the rich did not want to have a large group of educated government officials who could organize to limit the power of the rich, form powerful unions, or require due process and actual review of policy by people who are not dependent on money from corporations.

In the 1960s, graduates of Harvard Law School often started their careers working as government officials and even through the mid 1980s government work at the Federal government often went to the best and the brightest. From that time on, however, the best students went into business and increasingly into investment banks and other speculative businesses. Government ceased to have any appeal for all but a narrow group—and often it was appealing to those who were not very creative or innovative, but wanted a steady income, or to those who wanted to learn how government worked so that they could retire after a few years and exploit that understanding to make money.

As more and more of the federal government has been privatized, and unions in government, and throughout American society, have shrunk in influence, we see that government has become only a way to take the money printed up by the Federal Reserve, or brought in by taxes, and give it to multinational corporations that are contractors for services to the Federal government.

The Department for Government Efficiency is a battering ram to destroy what little remains of government as a third party independent of the rich, and to replace it with AI. Musk is pushing for the application of AI and automation in all aspects of government, suggesting that people are no longer necessary to run a government.

But does AI increase efficiency, or rather obscure how decisions are actually made. AI is presented as an inevitable and welcome development that will bring a new age of happiness, and that is an absolute must for security and health, and also necessary to compete with China.

Stargate, a massive global AI infrastructure program, involving Japan, especially Son Masayoshi’s SoftBank, is being “fast-tracked” to rapidly replace government with parks of supercomputers that are being funded by private corporations.

Miriam Adelson

The third multi-billionaire who played a decisive role in electing Trump and has direct impact on his policies through her intermediaries is Miriam Adelson. She is the widow of the real estate developer, casino operator, and major player in gambling, prostitution, banking, and real estate speculation around the world Sheldon Adelson. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were business partners of Trump in Los Vegas and Atlantic City, and elsewhere. They gave enormous contributions to his campaign and to various PAC (political action committees) that supported Trump, bringing together other billionaires to support his election in 2016 and 2020. After Sheldon’s death, Miriam has taken on the central role, giving Trump hundreds of millions for his campaign 2024 campaign and persuading him to take Mario Rubio as his secretary of state (after first suggesting that Rubio be vice president).

Miriam Adelson spends much of her time in Israel and she is a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu. There can be no doubt that in return for her support for Trump, Trump promised to give full support for Netanyahu and his plans for a greater Israel that extends its influence and economic control to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and beyond. The current plans to redevelop Gaza and expel the Palestinians living there in a blatantly brutal manner is a big part of that deal Trump made with Miriam Adelson and Netanyahu. Because Adelson and Trump have long worked together in the development of real estate it is natural that the Gaza problem has morphed into the Gaza redevelopment project. The Trump administration will support Israel unconditionally at all levels, and will promote the literal fusing together of the US and Israeli military and intelligence going forward, especially under the control of Oracle, Palantir and Amazon, three IT companies with strong connections to both nations.

Miriam married Sheldon Adelson in 1991 and they gave hundreds of millions of dollars to promote Zionist thought through the Adelson Foundation, supporting networks of Jewish youth who were militant devoted to the plan for Israeli expansion. She paid for much of Trump’s legal defense when he was subject to FBI investigations for so-called “Russian interference.” In return, Trump awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. Adelson was born Miriam in Tel Aviv in 1945 to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. Her father was a prominent member of Mapam, a left-wing political party in Israel, and he owned several movie theaters.

Miriam owns the Las Vegas Sands hotel and casino and the Zionist newspaper Israel Hayom. She is the richest person in Israel. The right-wing Rabbi Shmuley Boteach described her as “ the proudest Jew I have met.” She gives large amounts of money to the Zionist Organization of America, and US groups that fundraise for the Israeli military. She has supported arguments that anyone opposing Israeli policy is antisemitic and has funded the efforts to crack down on criticism of the killing of Palestinians.

She wrote an Op-Ed in Forbes Israel stating that those who protest against Israel are

“our enemies, the ideological enablers in the West of those who would go to any length to eradicate Jews from the Middle East. And, as such, they should be dead to us”.

Her enthusiastic support for Trump was tied to informal promises that a Trump administration would fully support the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank and back an expansion of Israeli-US control in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.

The fortune she uses was her husband Sheldon Adelson’s. He was the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation and extended his hotel and casino empire to include the massive Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore, and numerous casinos and hotels in Macao, and the Venetian Las Vegas and the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas. He gave large sums of money to the campaigns of Trump in 2016 and 2020, and also was a big supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The funds that Miriam Adelson gave to Trump were meant to make sure that Israel is at the center of all of his policy and that he will stick to the needs of the Netanyahu administration, no matter what the political costs elsewhere.

Timothy Mellon

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire who even denies he is a billionaire when asked, gave $150 million dollars to the Trump Campaign’s political action committee super PAC Make America Great Again in 2024, and probably much more money in a less direct fashion. He has emerged as one of the biggest supporters of the Republican Party. It was Mellon who stepped in to make a contribution of a $50 million on the day that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in May, 2024—thus keeping Trump afloat at the most difficult moment.

Mellon was the main mover behind the decision of Robert Kennedy to endorse Donald Trump for president, and extremely unusual move for a political figure like Kennedy who started out in the Democratic Party and who had been unrelenting in his criticism of Trump for cronyism, his abuse of workers, and his push for deregulation and a full assault on the environment for the profit of corporations. Kennedy’s political action committee “American Values 2024” received $25 million from Mellon in 2024 and Kennedy was quoted on the cover of Timothy Mellon’s autobiography “panam.captain” where Kennedy called the immensely wealthy and privileged Mellon a “maverick entrepreneur.”

In addition to Mellon’s massive donations to Trump and Kennedy, he gave $227 million dollars to political campaigns from 2020 to 2024, and $165 million in 2024 alone.

We know very little about why Mellon invested so much in Trump, or why he wanted Trump and Kennedy together. What we do know is that he wants massive deregulation of the American economy, and of American society, so that banks (which are his method of control) can run the nation without opposition from government or from citizens.

He is heavily invested in transportation as well, specifically and he is a big backer of crypto currencies. He has invested heavily in transportation such as trains, airlines and airports.

Timothy Mellon has also expressed interest in the crypto currency policies that the Trump administration is pushing in a “pump and dump” manner. He is one of the hidden hands behind the push to devalue the dollar and force people to accept privately controlled crypto currencies—how the push to force everyone to employ electronic money controlled by multinational corporations is tied to Mellon’s financial strategy is not clear, but it most likely tied to the effort to control both currency and trade.

His company Pan Am Railways was sold to the CSX Corporation in June 2022 and brought for $600 million dollars. Mellon is deeply involved in the radical consolidation of railways, trucking, and other means of transportation in the United States.

In July, 2025, the Trump administration pushed for the consolidation of rail transportation to reduce the railroads for transportation from four to two, starting with the merger of Union Pacific with Norfolk Southern, but also including a merger between the BNSF Railway and CSX (which Mellon has a stake in). None of Mellon’s control over this consolidation of transportation and logistics is available to the public.

What we do know is that his grandfather Andrew Mellon, who made the family fortune, fused together corporate and government power to advance the interests of his family to a unique degree, and the Mellon family made control of transportation central to their profits. Andrew Mellon diversified his investments over multiple fields, from transportation and manufacturing, to coal, oil, and aluminum, and created an enormous financial empire which is largely controlled by privately held banks that do not disclose their financial value.

Moreover, the battle to automate and privatize major ports around the world, in part as part of a brutal competition between American and Chinese financial interests engaged is of great interest to Mellon and his financial partners. The battle over the operation of the Panama Canal between BlackRock (US focused) and Hutchison Holdings (China focused) is but one example of that global battle. The “chokepoint” strategy of controlling the distribution of raw materials and finished products globally by using financial institutions to control critical ports, shipping companies, and all aspects of the supply chain and distribution is increasingly considered a security matter and the Department of Defense is deeply involved, as is the US Navy.

The Department of Defense under Trump has made supply chains, and by extension control of shipping and rail transportation, a high priority—that means essentially militarizing infrastructure. The Department of Defense is run by Steve Feinberg, Deputy Secretary of Defense. Because the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a television personality with no expertise in policy, Feinberg makes the real decisions, and does so from a financial, more than a military, perspective.

Steve Feinberg was previously CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm that has invested primarily in military contractors in the United States and elsewhere. Feinberg’s rise to that high position as someone who is an investment banker who tries to make money off of the military, rather than technology or strategy, represents the radical financialization of the US military.

Most critically, the current chairman of Cerberus Capital Management is

John Snow, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, and takes an equal interest in the profit, and militarization of, transportation. John Snow served as CEO of CSX, the very company that Mellon has such close financial ties to.

In any case, although the plots of Timothy Mellon to weaponize and control transportation, granted how secretive he is, represents the new form of politics under Trump perfectly. Secret governance by billionaires for the benefit of a tiny handful of families.