Three Unwise Men: Tech billionaires’ telling pilgrimage to the Trump inauguration

Three of the world’s richest men were a conspicuous presence in the audience for Donald Trump’s inauguration - even before Elon Musk made things weird.

Forth they all came to pay tribute.

The world’s richest tech moguls, having a grand old time together, buddying up for a little pilgrimage to Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The Three Unwise Men, we might call them. None of them brought myrrh or frankincense, but plenty of gold had changed hands before the ceremony.

And while Mr Trump is no baby (not physically, at least), he is being treated as something of a saviour, these days.

There was Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX and several other less famous companies, with a net worth of $690 billion, beaming like a kid at Disney World.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, worth $390 billion, was plonked next to his fiancee Lauren Sanchez. Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Facebook, worth $340 billion, took a sneaky peek at Ms Sanchez’s assets (no, not the financial kind, though I’m sure those are also impressive).

Aww look how happy he is. Picture: Kevin Lamarque/Getty Images

Ms Sanchez, Mr Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Picture: Saul Loeb/Getty Images

Mr Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

MORE: Elon Musk’s bizarre move with ex-partner Grimes exposed

Other parts of the ever more ascendant tech bro power axis were represented too, by Google’s Sundar Pichai and TikTok’s Zhang Yiming, for example.

The latter is worth a brief mention because, intriguingly, he popped up next to Mr Trump’s soon-to-be director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, at a time when America’s Congress has sought to impose a ban on his platform, citing national security concerns.

Mr Trump, who previously favoured such a ban, now opposes it.

This may have something to do with the success he enjoyed promoting his content on TikTok during the election campaign. Or perhaps the many millions of dollars in donations he received from one of the company’s major shareholders. Either way, a delightfully shameless backflip.

But let us focus on the Big Three, who have proven themselves to in fact be so very small and spineless in recent months.

Here we have a tiny club of men who, with their personal resources, could do a tremendous amount of good in the world. Elon alone could give away a cool $600 billion and still never have to worry about money for the rest of his life. Heck mate, make it a mere $500 billion. Treat yourself.

The newly inaugurated President. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

MORE: Where world’s richest men really hide their billions

Sadly neither he, nor Jeff, nor Mark has the necessary sense of civic duty. All three apparently prefer to further pad their own wealth, and with that in mind, they have spent the post-election period sucking up to Mr Trump quite relentlessly, hoping to protect their business interests and maybe even earn some influence over the government.

Obviously, given his activism on Mr Trump’s behalf, Elon has a whopping headstart in the ring-kissing contest.

He’s all set to get a cushy office in the White House’s West Wing, and will head a commission seeking to trim government spending by trillions of dollars.

This compares favourably to Mark, whose immediate goal is probably to ease Mr Trump down from a previous threat, issued not so long ago, to throw him in jail. Hence the recent swathe of changes to Facebook’s content moderation and diversity policies, in obvious concessions to the political right.

(One presumes, perhaps cynically, that Elon will not be focusing his cost-cutting scalpel/chainsaw on the billions of dollars in subsidies which have long benefited his own companies. Oh and one wonders when he will actually run those companies now, while also juggling his new government gig.)

Anyhooooo it is worth observing, as we progress into the era of Trump 2.0, whether the growing power and access available to these fabulously wealthy nerds fulfills the frenzied warnings, from Trump doomsayers, that America is becoming an “oligarchy”.

For now we can merely acknowledge how strange it was to see them all lined up to cheer Mr Trump on yesterday.

I was reminded, vividly, of the bullied kids at high school who would nevertheless crowd into the bleachers and enthusiastically support the jocks at every football game, as though suffering from a very particular type of Stockholm Syndrome.

Also strange was Elon’s performance, a little later, on stage in the Capitol One Arena. We’re going to have to talk about the saluting elephant in the room. (The Republican Party’s mascot is an elephant, you see. And Elon has become a partisan Republican. You can expect more of this incredibly weak wordplay on our website throughout the next four years.)

Ah. Bit unfortunate. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

So, we all know what that looks like. It’s harder to glean what Elon intended to do, with such a gesture, what meaning he was trying to convey, or why he thought it would be a good idea.

“Frankly they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” he wrote on Twitter overnight.

Ah yes, the old “dirty trick” that entails ... publishing footage of what you said and did in public. Is there no bottom to the deviousness, the depravity, the outrageous bias of the legacy media?

Next we’ll be publishing direct quotes, or checking whether the inflammatory claims made by influential billionaires are actually true. And from there it’s a quick trip to the much-predicted demise of Western civilisation.

Look, I didn’t think this was a particularly productive response from Elon. An alternative might have been to, hear me out, explain what the gesture in question was supposed to be. Was it a botched wave?

A spontaneous, involuntary convulsion of the deltoid muscles? Give us something to work with here, man.

The key message he should have tried to convey was: no, this thing that looked exactly like the infamous Nazi salute, which literally any politically engaged person on the planet would recognise as such, was in fact not intended to be a Nazi salute.

And for a bonus element of reassurance he could have added: Nazis are bad and I don’t like them.

This is not an unreasonable expectation. I daresay that, if you jumped up at a work meeting today and imitated Elon, your manager would have some follow-up questions.

He did it in the other direction as well. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images via AFP

Elon’s detractors would perhaps be more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this matter if he hadn’t been publicly supporting, with no small degree of enthusiasm, the closest thing Germany has had to a Nazi Party successor since .... well, the actual Nazis.

In addition to multiple tweets arguing “only the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) can save Germany”, Elon has rubbished concerns that the party is too extreme in a German newspaper, and platformed its co-leader Alice Weidel for a friendly live chat on Twitter.

This all serves as a decent, albeit troubling metaphor for the current state of American, and global, politics.

A bunch of unfathomably rich guys with far more confidence in their political opinions than is merited by their knowledge are blundering around doing deeply weird stuff.

They have the new American President’s ear. He finds their money useful, along with their tech platforms, and it’s not remotely clear how their influence can be limited.

Oh dear.

Twitter: @SamClench