We don’t need to wait until Tuesday night to name a handful of billionaires among the winners in this midterm election. Recent court decisions removing limits on campaign activity unleashed a flood of spending by the politically inclined super-rich. And disclosure rules haven’t kept pace, meaning much of what those players have done to exert their influence will remain in the dark.
But Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, has done his best to comb through disclosure reports and, by combining that information with qualitative judgments about softer forms of power, come up with a ranking of our new oligarchy. West’s index accompanies his new book on the same topic, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust. He tells Coins2Day it’s a “critique, not so much of the fact that they’re spending a lot of money—that’s perfectly fine—but of the lack of transparency in some of the cases, and the impact on governance.”
The names on his list will be more than familiar to our readers. Indeed, many have received the profile treatment from Coins2Day in recent years—or have been the subject of regular coverage. So, in the interest of shedding some light on their backstories and motivations, here’s West’s ranking, along with links to some of our coverage of the listees.
3. Tom Steyer
7. Robert “Bob” Mercer
8. Paul Singer
9. Peter Thiel
11. John and Laura Arnold
13. Family of the late Peter Lewis
14. Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg
17. Pierre and Pamela Omidyar
18. James “Jim” Simons
19. David Geffen
20. Penny Pritzker
21. Marc Andreessen
22. Peter Peterson
23. Donald Trump
24. Alice Walton