Editors’ Note: Building upon Inderjeet Parmar’s recent HistPhil contribution, Sally Brooks, Arun Kumar and Jessica Sklair argue that, by viewing elite philanthropy as a class practice dedicated to the perpetuation of global capitalism, we can begin to make sense of its current engagement with far-right authoritarian regimes.
By October 2026, the world’s richest man and for a few days its only trillionaire, Elon Musk, had spent U.S. $446 million to support Trump’s Republicans in the U.S. midterm elections. This, after having spent more than a quarter of a billion U.S. dollars in 2024 to support Trump and other Republicans getting elected to office, made Musk the biggest donor in U.S. political history. It has played no small part in the rise of what Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call ‘competitive authoritarianism’ in the U.S., where the abuse of power by the ruling regime disadvantages the opposition and co-opts critics.
We have witnessed similar patterns of ‘elections without democracy’ sustained for more than a decade in other countries across the globe including India, Turkey and until recently Hungary, among others. Such right-wing authoritarianism has led to the systematic violation of human rights, particularly of minority groups; erosion of democratic and civil institutions and the rule of law; and protracted economic crises that have eroded living standards and increased inequality.
Elite giving such as Musk’s is typically researched and written about as ‘political lobbying.’ However, we would argue that to properly comprehend the power and influence of elites, it is important that different forms of giving that they engage in—CSR, investments, patronage, philanthropy, and sponsorships, etc.—are read alongside each other.
In this article, which complements Inderjeet Parmar’s earlier contribution to HistPhil on the Hewlett Foundation’s “profound unreliability in any genuine struggle against the far right,” we argue that Musk’s support for right-wing authoritarianism, not only in the U.S., but also elsewhere and increasingly in Europe and Latin America, is not about the actions of one individual’s mala fide intentions. Instead, Musk’s giving in the U.S. should be read within a broader global history of philanthropy. This is because elite philanthropy has had a global, historical role in the rise of twenty-first century right-wing authoritarianism. Moreover, condemning Musk as the proverbial ‘rotten apple’ diverts attention from the systemic role of elites in the maintenance of global capitalism. In fact, it is only by viewing elite philanthropy as a class practice dedicated to the sustenance of global capitalism that we can make sense of its engagement with far-right authoritarian regimes across the globe today.
Elite philanthropy as a class practice
Philanthropy is broadly understood as a desire to help others, usually through donations of money, time, or expertise. Such donations, be they large or small, made directly, person-to-person, or channelled through organisations such as NGOs (‘charities’), family foundations or corporate bodies, are all clubbed together as ‘philanthropy’.
Yet not all philanthropy is the same. A modest donation to a food bank, for example, does not endow the donor with any influence over how that money is spent. Some NGOs do afford their collective membership a voice, though this is limited. But none of this compares with the influence wielded by super-wealthy individuals like Bill Gates when he is donating – and even when he isn’t. This is the essence of elite philanthropy, which makes it distinctive from other forms of charity with which many of us are engaged.
Uniquely, what elite philanthropists choose to call philanthropy sits alongside a broader set of strategies – corporate social responsibility, political donations, targeted sponsorships, patronage, etc. – that amplify their influence in ways that are not open to any other type of institution, philanthropic or otherwise. The North American Sackler family, for example, are an instructive case to consider, as chronicled by the Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his book, Empire of Pain. Throughout the opioid epidemic that has killed over 450,000 Americans since the late 1990s, the Sacklers used different forms of giving to whitewash their reputation and support the lucrative sale of their painkillers. Their businesses sponsored supposedly independent scientific magazines extolling the importance of pain management and opioids as a ‘scientifically’ proven medication, which was crucial to their commercial success. Their patronage of medical and pharmaceutical schools at elite U.S. universities further built their credibility across science and medicine communities, burnishing their elite standing. Their funding to some of the world’s leading art galleries and museums enabled them to accumulate further cultural and social capital. And finally, as the opioid crisis spread across the United States of America, their political patronage of individual regulators and elected leaders functioned to insulate them from ongoing or impending litigation.
To what end does elite giving, then, exercise this influence?
Elite philanthropy in global capitalism
As we argue in a recently published essay introducing a special section of Economy and Society, the core role of elite philanthropy is to ensure the reproduction of the global capitalist class through the cyclical processes of market creation, crisis management, and the implementation of ‘philanthropic fixes’. Our essay builds on Inderjeet Parmar’s work arguing that elite philanthropy functions as a ‘crisis machine’. Elite philanthropy acts to neutralise successive crises of capitalism by framing them as solvable through technocratic means.
Historically, elite philanthropy has played a crucial role in the management of crises generated by global capitalism – ecological, financial, political, social justice, etc. – using what we call ‘philanthropic fixes.’ These draw on three meanings of the word fix – following David Harvey – to solve a problem, to secure a particular solution in place, and to satisfy an addiction – in this case capitalism’s endless craving for the accumulation of wealth. A key characteristic of the philanthropic fix is its techno-managerial nature: it fixes the problem, at least temporarily, in a manner that opens up new avenues for capital accumulation while diverting attention from the problem’s root causes in exploitive capitalism itself.
To take one example, elite philanthropy has for several decades promoted techno-science solutions as the answer to food insecurity in the Global South. With the problem framed as one of productivity – solvable by technical means – knotty issues of redistribution and land reform could be taken off the table. This has culminated in recent years in domestic laws and regulations rewritten to facilitate the opening of markets and to accelerate the commercialisation of agriculture (including small farms) by a highly concentrated global agribusiness sector.
Another example is public health. Elite foundations have worked hard to establish a type of public-private partnership, exemplified by the Gates Foundation-supported Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), as the default global public health mechanism While vaccination rates have increased this has been achieved through a model oriented towards maximizing rentier profits for the pharmaceutical industry rather than building public sector capacities. Meanwhile the combination of Gavi and its financing arm, IFFIm (the International Finance Facility for Immunization), which issues “vaccine bonds” to financial market investors, has turned vaccine financing into a lucrative field of private investment.
Capitalising on authoritarianism
In 2019 Bill Gates vehemently opposed U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposals for a modest wealth tax. This was followed, soon after, by Gates’ (initial, public) opposition to even a temporary patent waiver that would have enabled a rapid scaling up of production of COVID vaccines and treatments and saved millions of lives. Defending the unassailability of a model that secured pharmaceutical industry monopoly was apparently more important.
Gates’ rather public gestures are revealing for two main reasons: firstly, they mark the end of elite philanthropy’s sophisticated conservatism of the past, when its influence was largely exercised in the shadows. Secondly, they reveal both the global scale of their influence and the naked pursuit of profits over and above all else. They are, of course, part of a wider transformation of global governance norms from postwar multilateralism to what Harris Gleckman calls multistakeholderism, in which governments are merely stakeholders alongside large corporations and philanthropic foundations. As part of which, elite philanthropy engineers new financial and organisational arrangements that allow philanthropists to direct not only their own private resources but also public resources in directions of their choosing, which invariably favour corporate interests in the short and long term.
So far, so familiar: these changes appear consistent with standard critiques of neoliberal efforts to sideline public institutions at state and supra-state levels. However, alongside this what we see emerging is a willingness to project bold visions of what the state should be and do. Elite philanthropy has engaged in overt campaigns to reimagine capitalism’s future, and the kind of state this requires. It is spearheaded by figures like the ‘contrarian philanthropist’ Peter Thiel, who notwithstanding his denunciation of philanthropy itself, has offered fellowships to students to drop out or delay college and funded ‘long termism’ research centres at leading universities; the hedge fund leader and political donor, Robert Mercer; and intermediaries like Steve Bannon. Such super-wealthy ‘philanthropic’ figures that straddle the worlds of Big Tech and “alt finance” (that is, the more secretive and under-regulated reaches of global finance such as private equity, venture capital and digital finance). All are closely associated with the Trump regime and the global promotion of far-right authoritarianism.
Yet these high-profile, far-right proselytisers are not quite the outliers we imagined. Rather, they form one end of a continuum of levels of engagement with the far right. For example, the Hewlett Foundation, once a pillar of the liberal world order, has chosen to interpret Trump 2.0, not as a dangerous symptom of a crisis of capitalism but as a mere blossoming of ideological diversity that can be accommodated by a ‘both sides’ approach – as has been highlighted by Inderjeet Parmar. Meanwhile, research by Paul Sylvestre, Fahad Ahmad and Adam Saifer shows how elite foundations in Canada have been hedging their bets by extending membership of grantee lists to include explicitly far-right organisations in a manner that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Thus, elite philanthropy works, whether proactively (like in Thiel or Musk’s case) or accommodatingly (as in the case of the Hewlett Foundation), to seed, propagate, and legitimize a form of right-wing authoritarianism that channels populist anti-elite sentiment while promoting the interests of the business elite that it represents. Its objective, throughout, is to protect and promote elite class interests – in a clear repudiation of its supposed “love for humankind”. What philanthropic support of right-wing authoritarianism enables is the naked pursuit of these interests. In return, by dismantling regulations, hollowing out oversight agencies from within, stacking the judicial system, gerrymandering, appointing loyalists to positions of power, censoring independent media, and sanctioning all opposition – right-wing authoritarianism serves the hand that feeds it.
-Sally Brooks, Arun Kumar, and Jessica Sklair
Sally Brooks is an Honorary Fellow in the School for Business and Society and member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at the University of York. Her research focuses on the political economy of global development, technology and agrarian change, and the role of elite philanthropy.
Arun Kumar is Reader in Global Development and Management at King’s College London and the author of Philanthropy and the development of modern India: In the name of nation (Oxford University Press, 2021). He researches the role of elite philanthropy and business schools in the development of capitalism in the Global South.
Jessica Sklair is a Lecturer in the Queen Mary Business School at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Brazilian Elites and their Philanthropy: Wealth at the Service of Development (Routledge, 2022). Her work explores elite philanthropy, the financialisation of development, and the effects of expanding credit markets in Brazil.
