America is close to having its first real oligarch, a Russian dissident — and former world chess champion — warned in an interview Sunday.
Garry Kasparov, who now chairs the Renew Democracy Initiative, claimed to the Huffington Post that Elon Musk’s emergence at Trump’s side mixes business and politics in the same way as was seen in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“There are certain lessons that I think we can learn from Russia in the ’90s,” he said.
“The blurring of the lines between business and politics, which is called oligarchy by classical political philosophy ― it’s extremely dangerous.”
Russian oligarchs – defined as very rich business leaders with a massive amount of political influence — are extremely powerful, effectively controlling the law to reward supporters and crush their opponents, he said.
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“Musk could be the first oligarch,” he said. “Having the largest private contractor of the U.S. government potentially being in the position of supervising the entire U.S. budget? I mean, just think about it. If this is not classical oligarchy, what is it?”
“Oligarchy is not about the amount of money. Oligarchy is about blurring the line, erasing the line, between business and government.”
Musk was put in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an as yet unofficial arm of the Trump administration tasked with finding massive cuts in federal spending.
Kasparov said he’s waiting to see if Musk will act outside of ethics rules which would require him to step down as CEO of his companies to operate DOGE.
“That’s because the concept of “conflicts of interest” doesn’t exist under oligarchy,” Huffington Post paraphrased.
