How billionaires are rewriting history and democracy

Ahmed Bouzid, Tribune News Service

In the Gilded Age of the millionaire, wealth signified ownership. The titans of old built railroads, monopolised oil, and bought their indulgences in yachts, mansions, and eventually, sports teams. A franchise was the crown jewel: a visible, glamorous token of success. But that era is over. Today’s billionaires, those who tower, not with millions but with unimaginable billions, find sports teams and other baubles beneath them. For this new aristocracy, the true prize is authorship of History (with a capital “H”) itself.

Once you pass a certain threshold of wealth, it seems, mere possessions no longer thrill. At the billionaire’s scale, you wake up in the morning searching for something grand enough to justify your own existence, something commensurate with your supposed singularly historical importance. To buy a team or build another mansion is routine, played, trite. To reshape the very framework of society — now that is a worthy stimulus. That is the game. And increasingly, billionaires are playing it.

Look closely at the moves of men like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and others. Their empires extend, not just over products and markets but over political culture, public institutions, and even national policy.

They cast themselves as visionaries, masters of grand strategies invisible to ordinary eyes. They fund initiatives that fracture public life, manipulate information ecosystems, and bend governments toward serving private rather than public interests. Their reward is not merely financial return but the intoxicating sense of power that comes from steering the destiny of millions.

Hence, nothing startling or puzzling in their fascination with transhumanism, for instance, or radical life extension, or the technological pursuit of immortality. Many of the same figures who bankroll think tanks and media platforms also invest heavily in longevity biotech, cryonics, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial general intelligence (AGI) research.

Their interest is not only speculative engineering; it is existential. For some, the quest for radically extended life or the ability to preserve or upload consciousness promises a literal escape hatch from mortality — a way to make their projects and preferences persist beyond a single lifespan.

For others, belief in a coming “singularity” and the transformative power of AGI supplies both a metaphysical narrative and a practical tool: If intelligence can be engineered and amplified, then so too can social order. This fusion of immortalist yearning and techno-utopianism explains why investments in AI, neural interfaces, and longevity industries sit comfortably alongside their type of political interventions: Both are attempts to institutionalise control over the future, to render one’s will durable across time and bodies.

The strategies vary in method but not in essence. One path has been the evisceration of the working class through globalisation. By financing the offshoring of jobs, billionaires restructured the global economy in ways that hollowed out American towns while enriching multinational corporations. The move was not simply about lowering costs. It was a restructuring of social power — weakening organised labour, disempowering the industrial base, and leaving workers in constant insecurity. A diminished working class is easier to control.

Another path has been through culture and media. Billionaires have poured money into think tanks, foundations, and media platforms, not simply to influence policy but to shape what can even be discussed in the first place. When the world’s wealthiest individuals own the megaphones, the boundaries of acceptable debate unsurprisingly shrink to what suits their interests. What we see is not merely ownership of companies but ownership of discourse; the power to decide which ideas circulate and which die in obscurity.

Still, another strategy involves direct policy warfare. For decades, billionaire-backed movements have sought to dismantle the social safety net, shrinking the welfare state until it can barely function. Ostensibly, this is done in the name of efficiency, but the effect is brutally clear: Millions forced into precarity, vulnerable populations left exposed, and minorities disproportionately harmed. Such policies don’t happen by accident; they are engineered through lobbying, campaign financing, and strategic political donations. The result is a polity where the government serves private profit more than public welfare.

At the same time, billionaires have fueled divisions that weaken democratic solidarity. The stoking of identity-based conflicts — pitting groups against one another over cultural issues — distracts from the consolidation of economic power at the top. Immigration, terrorism, and crime are hyped, not because they are unmanageable threats but because fear justifies surveillance, militarisation, and new tools of control. By the time the public realises what has happened, the state has been repurposed into a security apparatus that protects, not citizens but capital.

This is not to suggest that billionaires meet in secret to plot each of these moves together. Instead, it is to point out that they meet openly and plot and strategise and tell us exactly what they plan to do in glittering gatherings, such as the Bilderberg Meetings, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Milken Institute Global Conference, etc. Because, after all, History and the Future are theirs to design, and democracy is merely a clay to be molded here and there by their collective strategic genius.

The danger is not only that this distorts democracy but that it erodes the very principle of democratic agency. When a handful of individuals hold the power to rewire economies, manipulate debates, and reshape policies at will, ordinary citizens are reduced to spectators. Political life becomes a contest, not of ideas but of bankrolls. The myth that all citizens have equal say in democracy collapses under the sheer gravitational pull of billionaire ambition.

Defenders will say this is just philanthropy or “visionary leadership,” that great fortunes bring with them great “responsibility.” But responsibility without accountability is not democracy — it is monarchy by another name. When billionaires intervene in climate policy, education, or even space exploration, their priorities may align with the public good for a time, but what happens when they don’t? Who checks them? Who votes them out?

If democracy is to mean anything, it cannot allow its destiny to be the playground of a few titans seeking meaning through stimulation. The ownership of History must remain collective, not private. That requires reining in billionaire power by imagining a whole new way of doing politics and government that renders the oceans of money that billionaires control null currency in the arena of democratic decision making.