Where Have All the Right-Wing Billionaires Gone?

Throughout every political outrage since COVID/George Floyd the Left has been ten steps ahead of the Right. Too many explanations have been offered to bother recounting, but they usually gravitate around a cluster of common bugbears: The Republicans are milquetoast conservatives, too endeared to the donor class to care; The Right can’t produce art so we are automatically at a disadvantage in the Culture War; The Left has “marched” through the institutions and captured them, leaving us with no soft power; The Right…

One explanation that rarely surfaces though is the role of billionaires (in which I’m including the even larger cohort of hecto-millionaires for simplicity… why split hairs?) in bank-rolling the activities of the Left. Perhaps the absence of blame is out of deference to men like Elon Musk or Donald Trump… billionaires who might arguably save Western Civilization. Or maybe it’s the sheer difference in bench strength: the Left has far more billionaires despite their protests that they’re the underdog.

Trump is serving a miraculous and incredulous second term, yet the wealthiest potential benefactors of the grassroots are still too timid to un-anon themselves and open their wallets?

Regardless of the reason there is no justification for the absence of Right-wing billionaires to fund our cause. There is more than enough money on the right to be funding every manner of cultural, societal and institutional opposition to everything from the Deep State to Hollywood. So where are the billionaires?

Well, there are billionaires on our side beyond Elon Musk. Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire has been a financial backer of the Manhattan Institute, the publisher of City Journal, and Peter Thiel is rumored to be connected to Passage Press. And let’s not forget… wait, that’s about it.

Not only is this short-list short, but it’s really not that impressive. Singer’s disclosed involvement with the Manhattan Institute is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He’s certainly helped to raise additional funds but that’s all the direct contributions we know of. As for Thiel, his involvement in Passage Press is only a rumor. While this rumor is plausible we simply don’t know the truth, and if his involvement is much more substantial then why the secrecy?

The reality is that there is billionaire involvement in Right-Wing endeavors but it is either small, limited or unnecessarily secretive. Trump is serving a miraculous and incredulous second term, yet the wealthiest potential benefactors of the grassroots are still too timid to un-anon themselves and open their wallets?

Whether it’s the timidity to disclose their participation or the small sums involved, it’s safe to say these billionaires simply don’t take enough risk when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. This is obviously not a problem for the Left who glory in the irony of George Soros funding almost Marxist cause imaginable – to say nothing of the dozens of other high-profile billionaires and CEOs doing likewise. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Reid Hoffman. Ted Sarandos. Michael Bloomberg. Jeff Bezos. And these are only the most famous examples. There are literally dozens of others, most of whom you’ve never heard of because their meagre fortunes only sit in the low- to mid- ten figures.

One of the big problems is that billionaires on the Right aren’t accustomed to thinking of politics beyond its instrumentality. While Left-wing billionaires view private money as a means to alter the entire structure of society, Right-wing billionaires are stuck in the 1980s. They view politically motivated contributions as a means to a specific end. Thus, oil tycoons will call themselves Right-wing, vote for Bush and give money to John Cornyn or Ted Cruz with the goal of getting the House Committee on Drilling in National Parks to pass some arcane regulation that allows fracking on Mount Rushmore. Beyond that they simply don’t care. There’s no money in it for them. Their conservative credentials go no further than regulatory approval or executive fiat. If a project doesn’t bring them a higher internal rate-of-return then fuck it.

We’re talking about killing the oil embargo terrorists, while they’re talking about switching to cars with better mileage. The generational phase shift couldn’t be any larger.

To be sure other Right-wing billionaires have contributed much to “the cause” in the form of electoral donations. This makes sense given that limit to their largesse seems to be instrumentalism. But even back in 2016 there were superannuated titans of industry donating to long-shot Donald Trump, without any real hope of seeing a “return” on their investments. Robert Mercer, Co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies (the most successful hedge fund in history) was a major donor. He’s potentially worth a mere $1B and donated $25 million in 2016. I can rhyme-off a few others but what’s the point? Either their net worth is similarly underwhelming, or their donations were. Despite plenty of money being available not one came close to Elon Musk’s financial efforts (directly and indirectly) – and he’s a former liberal.

At this point we’re supposed to accede to the neocon/libertarian argument that our billionaires are “true” capitalists and that blah, blah, blah. Sure, but it’s 2025 now. No need to believe that claptrap and still call yourself Right-wing. If the limit of your creed is simple return on investment, then at best that makes you a politically homeless believer in both-sidism. At worst you’re enabling the Globalist takeover and emaciation of our economy.

Part of the problem is that the billionaires who tend to the Right are generally boomercons. They made their money in legacy industries. The Left’s roster of billionaire contributors is skewed heavily to technology, hedge funds or culture. This puts them at an instant advantage – not necessarily because the amounts of their fortunes are larger, but because they are much more in tune with the zeitgeist.

Having a mega-donor base that’s almost exclusively boomers means not just tone-deafness to the changing reality, but also defeatism. As boomers they fail to comprehend what’s at stake. These are still people that still read National Review and think we should stop everything “until we settle this whole abortion thing.” Aside from the issue of their advanced age, they still think that George Floyd, etc, is just a temporary blip in the historiographer’s radar and if we just wait long enough the grandfather clock in the nursery will magically reset to 1996. We’ll all be able to go back to arguing about violence in cartoons and the correct spelling of “potatoe”. Meanwhile progressives and Marxists have hoovered up every inch of the Elite and left us in the dust.

The current movement on the Right is so far beyond them, and appreciates so much more clearly what is at stake, that it’s hard to get their attention, let alone their credulity. We’re talking about killing the oil embargo terrorists, while they’re talking about switching to cars with better mileage. The generational phase shift couldn’t be any larger.

Perhaps in the final analysis the triumphalist malaise that infects their minds really just comes down to creative thinking. The Left realized a long time ago that only by controlling the institutions can you build a utopia. They understood that the public – that is the citizens of the republic – would never countenance their program of deprivation and systematic leveling. They understood that to achieve real and lasting power they needed to bypass the democratic process and forge a new path.

After Goldwater’s defeat the Right abandoned the long march of winning hearts-and-minds and decided to focus on near terms wins. This was based on the backwards assumption by that the working class would remain captive to the Unions and thus never be a natural ally in the coming culture wars. Like a modern-day CEO worried about how next quarter will look to analysts, we’ve seen our stock rise and then fall and now they’ve cut our credit rating.

The Right-wing billionaire thinks of how many new F-35s his $10 million donation to Lindsay Graham will buy him, but doesn’t see the Left spending far less and reaping far more. A perfect example of this is the Climate Action 100+ lobby group that has bullied the largest (private) fund managers in the world to support every regressive scheme from ESG to DEI.[1]

Who or what is Climate Action 100+? Well, they’re a lobbying group that managed to takeover the board of directors of Exxon – one of the biggest oil majors in the world. Then they got them to legally commit to not producing oil, even though that’s, well, their main fucking business.

Forget for a moment this is clear breach of fiduciary duty and corporate statutes – that’s legal nonsense for liberal judges to sort out anyway. The real crime here is that Climate Action 100+, with a few small ($3-5 million) donations from men like Soros, Bezos, etc, were able to pressure the world’s largest asset manager (BlackRock) into replacing enough of the board of Exxon that it committed to zero emissions.[2]

Just think about that. For the low, one-time payment of $3 million dollars you can snuff out oil production of one of the biggest global producers (not to mention to gravy train of “offset” investments that will benefit other far left causes), drive up the price of energy, reduce standards of living, impoverish the working classes, eliminate the middle class, and make the world safe for corporate oligarchy and technocracy. Not a bad return.

Or, think of Soros’ influence on the quality of life (crime, property values, livability) in American cities. His henchmen figured out that as no one votes in District Attorney elections, and all it would take would be a small investment per city ($1 million in some cases) to elect a patsy of their persuasion. San Francisco (my former hometown) was the textbook case. Barely 10,000 people vote for D.A., so dropping $1 million in campaign spending clinched the win. They then parachuted in an unreconstructed Marxist, Cheesa Boudin (the son of convicted murderers), to oversee the destruction of the city. You couldn’t pull a better plot from a 60s superhero serial hack-book if you tried. Sure enough, one by one, America’s cities fell to far leftist D.A.s who stopped prosecuting crimes, gave prolific indulgences to hardened criminals and cried celluloid crocodile tears for every innocent who paid the price.

In both cases Left-wing billionaires have publicly and openly out-bought, out-thought and out-fought a gaggle of octogenarians who they continue to denounce as the real oligarchy that controls the world! Has their victory simply been because they are better marketers than us?

No. Not even fucking close. As Ulysses’ perorated the Greeks, “Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.” They’ve won because almost no one on the Right with money has even begun to fight back. They’re too concerned about how bean-counters will view their investments and how regulators will rule on their projects. If their awareness was any smaller their heads would implode to the size of pea. These are men whose aspirations are as inspiring as a cadaver’s final flatulence

It’s a miracle that Musk wasn’t too fussed about losing billions on Twitter just to maintain free speech, and that’s perhaps all we can ask of him. As for other Right-wing billionaires and hector-millionaires, all I can do is draw your attention back forty years to something called a “commercial” wherein an old lady was once quoted, decrying this pithy demand from her local fast-food joint: “Where’s the beef?!”

[1] The public fund managers needed no bullying. They were at the front of the pack attempting to destroy shareholder and economic value.

[2] In fairness BlackRock at least had the brains to be, initially, reluctant to participate in the scheme. Other mega-asset managers joined up without complaint.