The Party of Billionaires
By 
Is who it always is, but not who the political press has generally told you it is:
New York City billionaire John Catsimatidis has long been immersed in politics. But last year the Republican real estate and oil tycoon donated more money than he ever had before — $2.4 million to support Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, nearly twice as much as he gave in 2016.
Catsimatidis said he feels a growing urgency to try to influence the course of American politics, given the wide divergence between the two parties.
“If you’re a billionaire, you want to stay a billionaire,” said Catsimatidis, whose net worth is estimated at $4.5 billion. It’s not just about his own wealth, he said, adding, “I worry about America and the way of life we have.”
In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics. Dozens have stepped up their political giving in recent years, leading to a record-breaking surge of donations by the ultrarich in 2024. Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times, well outpacing the growing costs of campaigns, a Washington Post analysis found.
In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets. By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people.
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America’s 902 billionaires are collectively worth more than $6.7 trillion, the most wealth ever amassed by the nation’s ultra-rich, according to Forbes. A little more than a decade ago, there were half as many billionaires in the U.S., with a total worth estimated at $2.6 trillion when adjusted for inflation. Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, recently secured an incentive-heavy $1 trillion pay package, which Tesla shareholders approved to keep him at the company for the next decade.
Overall, billionaires have rallied behind Trump’s Republican Party. More than 80 percent of the federal campaign spending by the 100 wealthiest Americans in 2024 went to Republicans, The Post found. Trump himself raised 15 times as much from the 100 richest Americans in 2024 than he did during his first presidential campaign, in 2016. By comparison, Democrat Kamala Harris raised three times as much from the wealthiest in 2024 as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Time for another Atlantic thumb-sucker about the New Republican Populism!