Elon Musk, rocket and electric car company chief, sometime Internet troll and more recently Donald Trump’s point man for cutting alleged waste from the federal government, may be on the cusp of becoming something else: the country’s first real oligarch.
That’s according to democracy activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Renew Democracy Initiative.
Kasparov should know. As a celebrity chess prodigy in the 1980s, he tried to use his fame to buck the Communist system in Russia. Kasparov became a dissident after the Soviet Union fell, when Russian president Vladimir Putin began turning back the clock on the country’s nascent democracy.
“There’s certain lessons that I think we can learn from Russia in the ’90s. The blurring of the lines between business and politics, which is called oligarchy by classical political philosophy ― it’s extremely dangerous,” Kasparov told HuffPost in a recent interview.
Russia and some other post-Soviet countries, like Belarus or Kazahkstan, have struggled with democratic reforms and are run by strongmen able to subvert the law to reward their supporters and punish their opponents.
And Musk ― as both a major government contractor (by way of his companies) and now, potentially, as a Trump official with either formal or informal authority over how the government is reorganized ― could go beyond merely being wealthy and influential, Kasparov said.
“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,” Kasparov went on. “Oligarchy is about blurring the line, erasing the line, between business and government.”
Ultimately, he said the question will hinge on whether Musk and the still nebulous Department of Government Efficiency — currently not an official agency — will operate within or outside of usual federal government ethics safeguards, and whether Musk will have to step aside from his CEO roles to run DOGE to avoid conflicts of interest.
That’s because the concept of “conflicts of interest” doesn’t exist under oligarchy, he said.
Official government departments can only be created by Congress, and Trump’s announcement of DOGE made it sound as if the new “department” will be only advisory in nature, at least on paper.
Regardless, Musk has posted often on social media in ways suggesting it will have real power. He criticized the expensive F-35 fighter jet program, drawing the ire of many defense analysts. And he posted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, meant to crack down on fraud in consumer lending, should be eliminated.
Things may be clearer after Musk meets with congressional Republicans Dec. 5 on Capitol Hill.
Trump has attacked democracy by collapsing the boundaries of what’s seen as normal, Kasparov said. Trump is already the first convicted felon to win the office and the first president to ever be impeached twice. But Kasparov said the thing to watch is not what laws Trump breaks this time but what norms he violates, and what he does simply by using the power of his office.
He pointed to the fate of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists as one possible example, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if some were pardoned and they were welcomed into the Oval Office with pomp and circumstance.
“Presidential power will allow him to pardon these people, which will send a message to his supporters across the country: They will always be immune if they act on behalf of Donald Trump,” he said.
Similarly, he said Trump’s slate of right-wing Cabinet nominees, including Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, represented another effort to break norms.
As “something that was abnormal becomes normal, he moves further,” Kasparov said.
As for solutions, he said Democrats need to examine the reasons they lost and learn from them. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kasparov laid the blame at the feet of Kamala Harris and her failure to “separate herself from Democrats’ bankrupt and alienating status quo.”
“I think she was a bad candidate, and it was a very poor campaign,” he told HuffPost.
Strongmen depend on their opponents getting weary and turning inward and away from politics, a luxury Kasparov said Trump critics can’t afford now.
“They want us to be passive. And yes, they voted and they lost,” he said of Harris supporters. “But what I learned from the game of chess, and I’ve been saying it at every lecture I did about strategy, [is] you have to understand why you lost.”
Kasparov came to prominence in the mid-1980s as a young chess upstart, representing a break from the stodgy apparatchiks favored by Soviet officials as champions. At 22, he was the youngest world chess champion ever. (The 40th anniversary of the famous 48-game, five-month-long match with Anatoly Karpov, considered chess’ version of the famous Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match, is only a few months away.)
In 2013, Kasparov fled Russia for the U.S. Now, with professional chess behind him and as the father of children who are U.S. citizens, he said he’s found a second calling in fighting autocracy globally.
“It’s somehow in great demand in America,” he said, of his experience living in the Soviet Union and in Putin’s Russia. “I didn’t expect it, but I’m more than happy to share my experience, because I can speak from the position of authority.”
And he urged people who, like him, are anxious about democracy not to give up — and not just for the sake of the U.S.
“The game is not over. America is still a free country,” he said, calling it “a bigger hope” to billions of people globally.”
“You still have millions of people trying to fight for freedom in the conditions that are not even close [to], or remotely remind you, of what’s happening in America.”