How Trump’s tech bros sucked the life out of Texas

A new broligarchy’ of the super-rich has emerged in the US but it is the ordinary citizens and the cities they live in who will suffer from unrestrained growth, warns Alex Hannaford

- Alex Hannaford

As Donald Trump took the oath of office on 20 January to become the 47th president of the United States, watching from the second row where politicians and long-serving government officials once sat was a collection of tech billionaires instead.

Elon Musk looked like he'd purchased his seat with the same casual largesse he applies to buying social media platforms. Sundar Pichai of Google appeared calculated, a corporate chess piece positioning himself for the next move. Jeff Bezos was busy smizing, barely concealing his ambition to secure government contracts for his space company, Blue Origin.

And then there was Mark Zuckerberg – nerdy, harmless ol’ Zuck, like a graduate student who’d wandered into the wrong room, but whose embracing of Trump seems, somehow, the most egregious. Perhaps we thought better of him?

This wasn’t just an inauguration. This was a transaction – a public display of how power now moves in modern America. Not through votes, but through carefully calibrated access. On a day meant to honour Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy of justice, the presidential inauguration instead showcased a gaggle of tech billionaires whose combined wealth dwarfed that of the millions of working-class voters who’d delivered Trump his narrow electoral victory.

The lineup on 20 January told us an ugly story about who wields the real power in Washington. And as we wait to find out what the world looks like when Tech titans run the show, there’s a place we can look that may offer a hint of things to come.