Business | Schumpeter

Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy

Reasons not to panic about the tech-industrial complex

A surreal scene with a striped bowl holding the Statue of Liberty's torch, surrounded by floating, distorted faces and small planets.
Illustration: Brett Ryder

WHAT NATION can you fit into the Capitol Rotunda? Answer: somewhere between a Portugal and a Thailand. Each country’s total household net wealth was $1.3trn, give or take, according to the latest available figures from a few years ago. This is around the accumulated fortune of the billionaires who turned up for Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20th. Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, a luxury empire, and Europe’s richest man, represented the old continent’s fat cats. Mukesh Ambani, an Indian industrialist who is Mr Arnault’s Asian opposite number, stood in for the global south’s.

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