As his superyacht Boardwalk docked in Venice as part of the “Freedom 250 Coastal Diplomacy Italy initiative” in July, billionaire US Ambassador Tilman J. Fertitta was greeted by protests. Fertitta was traveling across the country to meet “with local business leaders, celebrities and Americans on board the yacht,” according to CNN. The incident captured a growing trend of ultrawealthy business figures in positions of political power.
Fertitta is one of several billionaire US ambassadors, alongside those serving in the UK, Turkey, France and Monaco, and the Organization of American States. Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff and outside adviser Jared Kushner are also billionaires, along with Trump’s commerce secretary, education secretary, interior secretary, head of NASA, and administrator of the small business administration.
The Trump administration includes 57 cabinet members and senior officials with net worths of more than $100 million, according to El País. A more informal integration of billionaires into diplomacy was seen during Trump’s May 2026 visit to China. More than a dozen CEOs and senior executives, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, joined the US delegation.
Businessmen have long been prominent in local American politics. A 2021 study by political scientist Patricia A. Kirkland of more than 3,200 mayors in 263 cities found that nearly a third of mayors have either been business owners or have executive experience, making it the most common prior profession. But Trump’s second term has brought the ultrawealthy into government at a rapid, top-down scale, believing that their experience building companies, managing organizations, and negotiating deals makes them better equipped than established politicians dependent on outside funding.
The ongoing billionaire-politician surge has tapped into a wider anti-establishment mood in the country, and the shrinking of the permanent bureaucracy under DOGE has further elevated political appointees and outside advisers.
But it is neither a new American phenomenon nor confined to the United States. More than 11 percent of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office, according to a 2023 study in Perspectives on Politics, spanning various government systems. The trend is reshaping international relations as governments adapt to this change.
The Rise and Return of the Politician Businessman
Businessmen were just one of many professions who entered politics in early America, alongside lawyers, landowners, veterans, and merchants. But industrialization allowed some to build enormous fortunes through railroads, manufacturing, banking, and natural resources. Compared with Europe’s more aristocratic systems, American industrialists increasingly found opportunities to buy their way into political power.
By the early 20th century, several businessmen had reached Washington’s inner circles; banking and industrial magnate Andrew Mellon became Treasury secretary in 1921, while banker Jesse H. Jones chaired the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and later became commerce secretary. During World War II, hundreds of executives entered the government as “dollar-a-year-men” to help manage war efforts, including General Motors president William S. Knudsen.
Their direct political influence hit a wall after WWII, as military veterans came to dominate political office. A 1956 Time article noted businessmen’s declining involvement, quoting an industrialist who complained that “the same old warhorses” remained dominant in both parties. Lawyers, though in slow decline, also remained powerful, making up 60 percent of Congress in 1960, while a variety of staffers, campaign officials, policy advisers, and career bureaucrats emerged as another growing political class.
By the end of the 20th century, however, billionaires were again testing the limits of how far wealth could take them. Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996 showed that personal fortunes could propel businessmen onto the national stage, helping inspire Trump’s first presidential run in 2000. Michael Bloomberg’s successful run for New York City mayor in 2002, where he served until 2013, showed that the GOP could embrace the model, with others like Bill Haslam demonstrating its reach into state government as he became the governor of Tennessee (2011–2019).
Trump’s 2016 victory accelerated the trend. His appointment of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state in 2017 signaled that corporate experience was treated as a governing asset, while billionaire businessman Robert Johnson was appointed ambassador to the UK.
Democrats embraced the billionaire politician model, too. Mark Dayton became senator for Minnesota in 2001 and later served as its governor between 2011 and 2019. Bloomberg (now a Democrat) and Tom Steyer both sought the presidential nomination in 2020, while J.B. Pritzker has served as Illinois’ governor since 2019.
The growing overlap between business and political figures has greatly influenced geopolitics. Major technology, finance, energy, and defense firms close to the White House also operate global infrastructure and supply chains that foreign governments depend on. Elon Musk’s Starlink, for example, is essential to Ukraine’s war effort.
The Trump administration’s decision to own major stakes in private companies has further tied corporate interests more closely to US policy, raising questions about how this new fusion of business and government will affect Washington’s dealings abroad, as other countries manage their own class of politicians with vast wealth.
Adversarial Adoption
America’s growing business-politician class can be compared to both its principal adversaries, China and Russia. China’s political business class has been growing its direct contact with American officials and executives, with a delegation representing 22 Chinese companies traveling to the United States in July.
The prominent role of Chinese businessmen is relatively new. After decades of suppressing private capital, Chinese government reforms began encouraging cooperation with business forces in the late 1970s. As researcher Sara Tomczuk notes, the “large numbers of entrepreneurs co-opted into the party, especially in the 1980s, marked a decline in Communist ideology as well as a demonstration of the government’s commitment to a market economy.” The “three represents” campaign in 2000, meanwhile, formally recognized private entrepreneurs as part of China’s political order.
Today, more than a third of Chinese billionaires have held or sought formal political office, according to political science analysis website Good Authority. Some have served or are serving as delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC). For instance, Tencent CEO Ma Huateng was a deputy for two terms beginning in 2013 and Xiaomi’s Lei Jun is currently a deputy of NPC, while others like Baidu CEO Robin Li were part of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. For Beijing, incorporating billionaires with political titles signals loyalty, while giving entrepreneurs access and protection. Alibaba founder Jack Ma and other tycoons have, however, demonstrated the limits of that protection when they overstep. Jack Ma criticized China’s financial system in 2020 and “largely disappeared from public view,” for a while according to NPR.
Still, the business-political overlap has created another channel between China and the United States. Business leaders increasingly encounter one another through political relationships with shared commercial interests that provide an important communications channel, with China’s consul general in New York celebrating “natural consensus” between the business communities in June.
Russia had a near opposite experience with its ultrawealthy in politics. Instead of cautious integration, the Soviet collapse allowed oligarchs to accumulate enormous fortunes through privatization. Some assumed office, like former deputy secretary of the security council Boris Berezovsky, first deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Potanin, and former Deputy Chairman of State Duma Mikhail Gutseriev. Many of them had transactional relations with Western capital.
One in five Russian billionaires has sought or held political office, according to Good Authority, but Putin’s rise in 2000 steadily stripped many of them of their political roles. Others were jailed or exiled, and some retained their fortunes by accepting the Kremlin’s political supremacy. Alongside Putin-allied oligarchs ascending, the result was a “general decline in influence among oligarchs in favor of bureaucratic officials,” according to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
The suspicious deaths of dozens of oligarchs since the start of the Ukraine War show their increasing vulnerability. Still, they remain embedded in politics, with figures like Suleyman Kerimov, Mikhail Prokhorov, Andrey Guryev, and Andrei Skoch essential to helping support the Russian political system.
The business-political overlap remains visible in diplomacy. A 2017 meeting between Russian and US business leaders showed an early effort to use these ties before the Ukraine war sent relations into freefall years later. Nonetheless, they remain useful as backchannels; in January 2026, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin’s envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund, in Paris to discuss peace plans relating to the Ukraine war, and met again in Florida in March where they spoke on several topics, including Russian oil.
Others, like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, continue to play informal roles as state mediators, traveling to Kyiv in May to carry messages between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The New Political Order
The trend of business-political overlap has gone global, moving beyond the realm of the great powers. Much of the post-communist world moved in a similar direction, as newly wealthy businessmen entered political systems weakened by flawed democratic reforms.
Some became dominant political figures, such as Georgia’s Bidzina Ivanishvili, who became prime minister in 2012 and remains the country’s de facto leader through his Georgian Dream party. The Biden administration sanctioned him in 2024, but a Trump Tower planned for Tbilisi is now being developed on land partly owned by his son, Uta Ivanishvili, demonstrating how business relationships can provide workarounds to political barriers.
Similar cases of ultrawealthy businessmen entering politics emerged in Moldova and Ukraine, but EU integration efforts have sought to weaken that influence through “de-oligarchization,” particularly since 2022. Western Europe has generally remained wary of billionaires taking direct political power, with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi being the major exception, serving as Italy’s prime minister in three stints between 1994 and 2011. Skepticism over his dominance meant he failed to establish a lasting model and helps explain the unease over Fertitta’s arrival in Venice and the wider apprehension over Trump.
But wealthy businessmen remain deeply embedded in former European communist countries. Bulgaria’s Delyan Peevski, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms party, has emerged as a vocal Trump ally, alongside Czechoslovakia’s Prime Minister Andrej Babis, creating an opening for the Trump administration to cultivate figures less constrained by Brussels.
As the Trump administration attempts to bring the Western Hemisphere under greater US influence, Latin America may be the most consequential for the government’s efforts to cultivate ties with politician-businessmen. Historically welcoming to the phenomenon, businessmen reached the presidency in the 2010s in Chile and Panama. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa assumed the presidency in 2023, and Nayib Bukele was reelected in El Salvador in 2024. Both have since worked closely with the Trump administration, with business ties being an integral component.
Mexico’s billionaires have proven useful to Washington, even without holding office. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, for example, has maintained ties with Trump since his first administration, and has used his business and media networks to challenge Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as she finds herself in disputes with Trump.
With globalization having helped create an international capital class, the United States has now given the businessman-politician model a new momentum. Some regions, including Western Europe and the Gulf monarchies, remain resistant, but the model is increasingly visible across the world, and may be more than a passing political trend.
Governments and populations may not be able to reverse this, but they will have to understand its implications. As business and political disputes increasingly overlap, commercial infrastructure can become a target. Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s Wildberries centers, the country’s biggest online retailer, and Iranian hits on Amazon data centers demonstrate how businesses can get caught directly in geopolitical conflict. And when political systems depend heavily on wealthy individuals, they can quickly become unstable when those alliances break down. With business relationships becoming a major way for states to communicate, negotiate, and compete in the 21st century, the line between economic and political power is steadily eroding, and the influence of a small number of wealthy individuals over governments and international affairs is becoming more pronounced.
