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Donald Trump and Elon Musk

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk sit ringside at a UFC fight in November.

Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC

Elon takes on Washington, but can he take it over?

Watching the year-end budget fights in Congress as we await the second term of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself wondering: Will this era be remembered as the time when Trump was president and Elon Musk ran the country?

Trump earned such nicknames as “Captain Chaos” and worse for his unpredictable, constantly changing and easily distracted approach to governing. But close observers of Trump’s political ups and downs understand a key to understanding the chaos: his mountainous self-regard.

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Money surrounding the Capitol
Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

Corporate political dollars spotlighted by new interactive database

The Center for Political Accountability recently launched The Barbara and Morris Pearl 527 Interactive Database, a user-friendly system created to shine a spotlight on under-the-radar corporate political spending in the United States.

This groundbreaking tool provides detailed and targeted access to information on contributions from publicly traded American companies to major partisan political organizations called 527s, for the section of the IRS code that governs them.

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Mark Zuckerberg holding a pair of glasses

Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth more than $200 billion, shows off new wearabel tech at the Meta Connect developer conference in September.

Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images

We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse

Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.

Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.

The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.

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Mobile phone listing Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft

Like black holes, the largest companies have a reach seemingly exceeds human capabilities, writes Frazier.

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Corporate black holes prevent fair play in the U.S. economy

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

NASA defines a black hole as “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out.” This celestial abnormality can even distort space-time. Though invisible to the human eye, a black hole is detectable by the extent to which everything around it is morphed to its will.

The same is true of our biggest corporations. The total reach of companies like Amazon, Meta and Google seemingly exceeds human capabilities. Yet, the extent to which our laws, culture and daily lives revolve around these corporate black holes reveals a hard truth: Fair play does not characterize our economy. The best ideas may never come to fruition and the smartest people may never realize their potential — they lack the escape velocity necessary to operate beyond the pull of the black holes.

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