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Elon Musk, a mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But, even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in point, Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is estimated to raise or leave flat the taxes of about 57 million households, while the top five per cent of earners will have their taxes cut by more than $1.5 trillion. From his perch in Washington, Evan Osnos has for years been looking at the politics of hyper-wealth. Although the wealthy have always held outsized influence, Osnos explains, tech tycoons in particular sought far greater influence under Trump’s second Administration. “These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship,” Osnos tells David Remnick, “and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people’s privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children’s emotional health, of our attention spans. They suddenly saw that there was a new President who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse but would in fact celebrate them, and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.” Osnos’s new book, collected from his reporting in The New Yorker, is “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.”

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