DOES AMERICA’S ‘TECH BROLIGARCHY’ REALLY TRUST TRUMP 2.0?
In one of the most dramatic examples of the triumph of hope over experience, America’s unleased tech ‘broligarchy’ is betting billions on the Second Coming of Donald Trump.
Shrewd heads like Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Elon Musk (Tesla), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) and Sam Altman (OpenAI) descended on Washington, cash in hand like giddy school fanboys, to sing from his praisebook and sign up to his promised American ‘Golden Age’.
Old heads are wondering whether it’s more likely to be a replay of America’s ‘Gilded Age’ (taken from a Mark Twain novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today).
The ‘Gilded Age’ ran from around 1870 to 1890 and was powered by industrialisation and the explosive growth of the nation’s railroads. It followed the carnage of the Civil War, saw great technical and economic growth and mass immigration and spawned ‘robber barons’ like Carnegie and Rothschild.
It produced great individual wealth and excesses but it was built on institutionalised labour exploitation and entrenched corruption and it exposed a chasm in prosperity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ that has continued to today.
There’s a world of difference between ‘golden’ and ‘gilded’: the former describes pure or solid gold, the latter refers to a thin coating of gold over base metal.
Experience tells us that gilded is a perfect description of Trump and his world.
