There’s less than three months to go until the U.S. presidential election on November 5, 2024. And like the sun rising, billionaires are increasingly making huge donations, or finding other ways to garner influence, to shape the election’s outcome and gain greater access and influence with its potential winner.
We all have our own interests, causes, and commitments, but billionaires actually have the wealth to advance theirs at the highest heights of power. Billionaires may accumulate their wealth through companies that accept public subsidies, rely on public infrastructure, and exploit workers, but they use their private fortunes to pursue large-scale policy agenda that impact us all.
This piece profiles a range of emblematic billionaires and the wider sectors, interests, and causes they represent.
From far-right Christian nationalists to fossil fuel barons, from public education dismantlers to Silicon Valley monopolists, these billionaires are all showering money on, or elbowing their way toward more access to, the presidential candidates with the hope of advancing their agendas that are almost always in opposition to the needs of working class people. And remember: behind each one of these billionaires stands a broader set of elite interests and influence operations backed by an even wider network of other ultra-wealthy donors.
Jeffrey Yass is the largest federal donor in the current election cycle, but if you haven’t heard of him yet, you’re not alone. Yass is not a very public figure, and he’s only started to make a big splash through his political donations over the past several years.
Yass is worth a whopping $28.5 billion. He is the richest person in the state of Pennsylvania. Yass oversees a Wall Street trading firm called Susquehanna International Group (SIG), and he’s made a fortune off high-risk trading and investing.
A big chunk of his wealth has come from his 7% share of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Yass’s stake is worth an estimated $21 billion.
Yass is something of a mini-Koch, funding a sprawling political operation made up of a range of rightwing groups and PACs. And no cause is dearer to Yass’s heart than school privatization.
Yass has spent tens of millions pushing school vouchers in states like Pennsylvania, Texas and Kentucky, and also backing federal school privatization PACs like the Club for Growth’s School Freedom Fund and the American Federation for Children’s Victory Fund.
While Yass hasn’t donated to any presidential candidate, he’s met with Trump, quickly flipping the former president’s position on TikTok. Yass has also invested in Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, and there are rumors that Yass could end up in Trump’s cabinet.
When it comes to school privatization, Yass appears to be motivated by his staunch libertarian ideology and belief that “free markets” solve all our problems, a savior complex, as well as tax credits for corporations that donate to private or charter schools.
Yass’s goal of school privatization aligns with a fellow billionaire, former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos. Depending on the election outcome, these billionaires stand to achieve their wildest dreams of dismantling public education in the U.S.
While he doesn’t have a huge national profile, oil billionaire Tim Dunn is well known in Texas.
For years, Dunn has poured tens of millions of dollars into Texas politics to shift the state’s GOP to the hard right — most notoriously, through the now-defunct Empower Texans, but also through a range of other groups and politicians, Dunn has advanced a far-right agenda, opposing everything from public school teachers to LGBTQ and reproductive rights, all driven by a Christian nationalist worldview.
Now Tim Dunn, who made his billions off the West Texas fracking boom, is going national, donating $5 million to pro-Trump Super PAC, funding a Trump-aligned think tank, and vying for influence in a potential second Trump administration.
The Texas Monthly has referred to Dunn as “the billionaire bully who wants to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy,” calling him “a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity” and instead “contends that only devout Christians are good Americans.” Former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus said that Dunn told him that “only Christians should hold leadership positions in the lower chamber,” according to Texas Tribune.
It’s no secret that rightwing evangelical Christians are perhaps the largest part of Donald Trump’s political coalition. Dunn, as perhaps the most........