Below, Casey Michel shares five key insights from his new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy.
Casey is a journalist who covers illicit finance, dark money, and kleptocracy for outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and more. He has also appeared on NPR, BBC, and CNN, among other stations.
What’s the Big Idea?
To understand today’s America, stop asking who won the last election and start asking who controls the money. The rise of a billionaire oligarchy explains everything from widening inequality to foreign influence and renewed imperial ambitions.
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1. The oligarchs have taken over.
You might think you know what oligarchy means. It literally means “rule of a few,” or when a small group of people runs a country. In a certain sense, that’s correct. But if you go all the way back to the earliest definition—all the way back to the days of Aristotle—you’ll see that it means something else. It’s not just the number of people, but how much money they have.
An oligarchy isn’t just you or me running a country. It’s about when the wealthiest people in that country take over and begin to run it to meet their own ends. They don’t necessarily need to be president, prime minister, or even have official office. All they have to be is the wealthiest in that country, and all they have to do is control the levers of power.
That’s what oligarchy is: when a small number of the wealthiest people control a country or a nation. And that’s what we have in the U.S.: a small group of multi-billionaires, and even a lone trillionaire, using their wealth to control this country’s domestic politics, decimate democracy, and pursue whatever foreign policy they want. That, in the 21st century, is America.
2. Wealth inequality is worse than you think.
You’ve probably heard of wealth inequality, or the idea that the wealthiest group of Americans holds a disproportionate amount of resources. You also might have heard of things like the American middle class being hollowed out in recent years. All of that is true, but it gets worse.
Not only do the wealthiest Americans have magnitudes more money, even adjusted for inflation, than people like John Rockefeller had during the Gilded Age, but they’re only getting richer and richer compared to the rest of us. America’s billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. In 2024 alone, the net worths of the wealthiest 19 families in America expanded by about $1 trillion total, or about $53 billion per family. Over the past 50 years, the share of the national income they control has nearly doubled—while the share owned by the bottom 50 percent has been cut in half.
“In 2024 alone, the net worths of the wealthiest 19 families in America expanded by about $1 trillion total, or about $53 billion per family.”
And as for that middle class? Well, it has been destroyed. There’s no more middle class to speak of. There are only the oligarchs, and everyone else.
3. Oligarchs are a dictator’s best friend.
The oligarchs detailed in the book are familiar names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner. You probably know all the damage they’ve done domestically, and how rich they’ve become in the process. But did you know that they, and a number of other oligarchs, have opened the doors to dictators around the world, ushering them into America and selling off the U.S. to the highest bidder?
There’s Donald Trump, who both before and during his presidency built up financial links with dictators, from real estate investments in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to resorts in Saudi Arabia and new crypto investments from the United Arab Emirates. There’s Elon Musk, who held secret back-channel conversations with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—and became so powerful in the Ukraine War that he could single-handedly prevent Ukraine from attacking Russian forces, even in Ukraine itself. Zuckerberg allegedly offered his services to the Chinese Communist Party to strengthen its grip on power, all while claiming he wanted to usher in a more open world. And then there’s Kushner, who received billions of dollars from dictators and then became the most important diplomat in America, creating the biggest conflict of interest in American history.
Lobbyists or shell company operators used to be the best friends a dictator could find. Now it’s American oligarchs.
4. Oligarchs and empire.
Like most people, you probably thought that things like Trump’s obsession with expanding America and annexing places like Greenland came out of nowhere. After all, aren’t the days of territorial expansion behind us? What is this, 1848?
But you’re missing one key ingredient: oligarchs. A number of wealthy donors to Trump want nothing more than to loot places like Greenland of all its resources, enriching themselves while expanding America’s borders. They can’t access the materials they seek to profit from due to obstacles like environmental regulations. But they’ve already mapped out where the resources exist and are trying to restart the American empire to get their hands on them.
“A number of wealthy donors to Trump want nothing more than to loot places like Greenland of all its resources, enriching themselves while expanding America’s borders.”
Some oligarchs are even funding efforts to create an entirely new world in places like Greenland—one that can do away with democracy, and even America, entirely. It’s far weirder than you could possibly imagine, and it’s a project that’s now well underway.
5. The oligarchs won’t win.
Oligarchs are the biggest threat the U.S. has faced in decades, but that doesn’t mean they will win. If anything, we can be optimistic about where things are going. In many ways, we’ve been here before. The Confederacy was just a previous version of the oligarchy we now face. So were the figures during the Gilded Age, who turned American politics into their own personal plaything—but eventually sparked the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and the entire Progressive Era. Even the era of Richard Nixon and Watergate, in which we saw a more corrupt administration than anything before Trump, ended in defeat for Nixon and the greatest burst of anti-corruption reform we’ve ever seen.
None of this will be easy or immediate, but American history is like a pendulum. Even though we’re on a clear downswing, all those previous downswings ended with successful reforms, democratic progress, and a new, less oligarchic era.
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