As Donald Trump becomes US president for a second time, Oxfam has released a report showing that the wealth of billionaires increased by $2tn in 2024, “three times faster than the year before”. About four new billionaires popped up every week last year, but “the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990”. “Many of the super-rich” Oxfam says “owe part of their wealth to historical colonialism”.
But colonialism isn’t a thing of the past. And due to ideology or simple self-interest, today’s billionaires are heavy supporters of and investors in the settler-colonial project of Israel. After 15 months of genocide in Gaza, in which Israeli occupiers have murdered around 18,000 children and utterly decimated the Palestinian territory, here’s a breakdown of some of the ways the world’s biggest billionaires have been backing the war-criminal apartheid state.
Trump’s billionaire colonial bros
In the words of the Zionist Organization of America’s Morton A. Klein, Trump himself is “the greatest president ever for Israel”. Klein insisted that “no U.S. president has done more for Israel than President Trump”. And that’s despite Joe Biden giving billions in military aid, along with total impunity, to Israel amid its most genocidal rampage yet against the Palestinian people. The fact is simply that Trump was always more of an ideological bedfellow for Israel’s war-criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right buddies.
The trio of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are kneeling at the altar of Trump right now, but mainly because they know he’ll allow them to boost their wealth even further. The three richest men in the world also support Israel:
- Musk backed Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, claiming Israel had “no choice” other than trying to eliminate Hamas. Israel absolutely did have a choice, of course. It simply chose genocide. And despite his links to antisemitic comments on the far right, Israel supporters gave him a free pass because he echoed propaganda talking points.
- Bezos has included Amazon in the “Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and the Israeli military”. This “provides the Israeli army with cloud services and AI tools used for surveillance, data analysis, and the targeting of individuals”. He also owns the Washington Post, a key source of establishment media propaganda in favour of Israel.
- Zuckerberg, meanwhile, not only called the actions of Hamas “pure evil” and failed to present a fraction of that outrage over the mass murder of children and others in Gaza. Additionally, he allowed Facebook and Instagram to become tools for manufacturing consent in favour of Israel’s genocide.
Other billionaires close to Trump are Peter Thiel (whose dodgy company Palantir “has been vocally supportive of Israeli military action”, and “may help with artificial intelligence used to identify military targets”) and Marc Andreessen (who has stepped up investments in Israel during the Gaza genocide).
At least 13 billionaires are due to serve in Trump’s government. It will reportedly be the richest administration in modern times.
Sensing a pattern?
- Oracle’s Larry Ellison, meanwhile, once gave the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) $16.6m. And that was on top of a donation of $10m just 3 years earlier. A Palestinian lawsuit, meanwhile, sought to hold Ellison, fellow billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and other pro-Israel figures to account in connection to illegal Israeli settlements and war crimes. Ellison is also close to Netanyahu.
- Bernard Arnault and his family are the only ones in the top ten richest people not in the US. But they have also invested regularly in Israeli businesses.
- Google’s billionaires aren’t only participating in Project Nimbus. The company of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin has also faced criticism in the past for not including Palestine on its maps, and more recently for sacking workers who protested “against a deal the technology giant has with the Israeli government”. That battle is ongoing.
- Warren Buffet has invested heavily in Israel, and “once hosted three Israel-bond dinners, where he helped raise almost $300 million for Israel“.
- Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has a very close connection with Israeli settler-colonialism, and even said “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company”. He and his wife have also “donated at least $1 million to the Jewish National Fund” – the group funding “dispossession of Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem”.
- Finally, Jensen Huang is happy to invest in Israel, with Nvidia just announcing this month “that it is building one of Israel’s largest data centers in Mevo Carmel near Haifa at an investment of more than $500 million”, marking a “the US chip giant’s deepening commitment to the country”.
And that’s just the top 10…
He didn’t make the top ten, but a dishonourable mention must go to Michael Dell, who is also passionate about the Israeli settler-colonial project. Dell “provides servers and related services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Israeli military”, and subsidiary EMC Israel Advanced Information Technologies is helping to settle and develop in the Naqab (Negev) desert, displacing local communities in the process. Dell donated $1.8m in 2014 to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
There are many more billionaires in the US who love Israel, but the list is long, including people like Michael Bloomberg and Robert Kraft. A few more are Daniel Abraham, Henry Samueli, Bernard Marcus, Ronald Lauder, Leon G. Cooperman, Lynn Schusterman, Haim Saban, Daniel Gilbert, Isaac Perlmutter, Ira Rennert, Sam Zell, David Green, Leslie Wexner, and Paul Singer.
Billionaires absolutely should not exist. As Oxfam’s Max Lawson insisted previously, the very existence of billionaires is “a sign of economic failure” and ‘undermines democracy’. The increasing inequality in recent decades and the simultaneously increasing power of the super-wealthy, meanwhile, has been utterly disastrous for ordinary people. And it seems the existence of billionaires is particularly bad for Palestinians, because super-rich individuals have been lobbying for Israel throughout its genocide, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be stop supporting the its criminal regime any time soon.
Featured image via the Canary