On January 6, 2021, a few hours after the assault by followers of donald trump to the US Congress, Steven Schwarzmanco-founder and CEO of the largest investment fund private equity of the world, blackstone -located in Spain among the llamastwo vulture funds, especially as a result of their purchase of 20,000 homes during the brick crisis – issued a statement declaring “that the insurrection that followed the president’s speech is horrible and an affront to the democratic values that, as Americans , we love”.
Schwarzman – who has a fortune of 39.3 billion euros according to the Bloomberg agency – ended his brief statement by stating that “as I said in November, the result of the elections is very clear and the transfer of powers must be peaceful.” It was quite a rejection of Trump by one of the heavyweights of Wall Street, who runs an institution that controls assets of nearly one trillion euros.
But Schwarzman was not alone. The next day, Nelson Peltz -1.5 billion dollars, thanks to its hedge fundTrian Partners – appeared on financial television network CNBC and said: “I voted for Trump in this election in November. I apologize for that.”
Three years, two months, one week and four days later, on March 18 of this year, Peltz declared to the Financial Times that he is going to vote for Trump, and that the four criminal proceedings against him, among which is the assault on the Capitol, “are an abuse of Justice.” Two months and three days later, on May 21, Schwarzman said that he too will vote for Trump.
Schwarzman and Peltz reflect how, as Trump has become a serious contender for the White House, His support has skyrocketed among the country’s great fortuneswhat some call 0.01%made up of people who They have more than 200 million euros of assetsaccording to an analysis conducted by the University of Pennsylvania.
The Republican candidate He presents himself as an enemy of establishment, but its popularity among the richest cannot be denied. Last Friday, the newspaper The New York Times reported that the billionaire Timothy Mellon has donated $50 million (49.7 million euros) to Trump after he had been found guilty by a popular jury in New York for committing 34 crimes. Mellon, unlike Schwarzman or Peltz, has not made his fortune but, like Trump, has inherited it. His grandfather is one of the most prominent figures of the so-called gilded age (golden age) of industrialization in the United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when his great-grandfather founded the Mellon Financial Corporation which today, under the name Bank of New York Mellon – or, as of 2025, simply, BNY-, is the thirteenth bank by assets in that country. Other major heirs, Dick and Liz Uihlein (6.2 billion euros), have given their campaign 9.3 million euros.
It is not a phenomenon exclusive to the US. Conservative populisms have a workerist rhetoric, against globalist companies whose only homeland is tax havens. But, in practice, they are supported by the same companies they attack. According to him Financial Times, “French businesses are courting Marine Le Pen,” whose party, National Rally, is favorite to win July’s legislative elections. In Great Britain, Brexit enjoyed the support of a good part of the City Londoner.
The same thing happened with Trump. During his campaign in 2016 he criticized the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then put one of his former directors – Steve Mnuchin, known as the king of evictions – at the head of the Treasury; He defended the reindustrialization of the United States but appointed Wilbur Ross – alias the king of bankruptcies for his practice of buying steel mills and closing them – Secretary of Commerce; and said that “what the hedge funds is like committing murder with impunity,” despite the fact that his campaign was financed in part by Robert Mercer, of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Another leader in the sector, John Paulson, who pocketed 4 billion in 2007, supports Trump’s accusations of electoral fraud in 2020.
Elon Musk talks to Trump every week
Trump, thus, has gone from being the millionaires’ pariah to their candidate. Elon Musk talks to him on the phone every week, despite the fact that in the primaries he actively supported his rival Ron DeSantis. Other Silicon Valley leaders, such as ultraPeter Thiel -Meta, SpaceX, Palantir-, who opposes women voting, the defender of colonialism Marc Andreessen -founder of the 1990s browser Netscape-, co-founder of Uber, Travis Kalanickand the defender of the Russian invasion of Ukraine David Sacks They also go with the former president.
All this happens despite the fact that The US economy has continued to grow with Biden and both Wall Street and Silicon Valley are going like rockets, with Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple with a combined market value of ten trillion dollars, as much as everything Japan and Germany produce in a year combined. Biden has strengthened regulations, has sometimes adopted harsh rhetoric with companies, and has handed over the defense of competition to the most progressive Democratic sector. And, if he is re-elected, he will let some of Trump’s tax cuts not be renewed in 2025.
But the numbers show that Biden is making America the largest industrialized economy that is growing the mostand without the need to increase the immense public debt of eight trillion dollars – a third of everything the State owes – that Trump created with his tax cuts and his mismanagement of Covid-19.
With those figures in hand, The Financial Times has described the attitude of these businessmen as “short-sighted.” It is an idea that coincides with that of Biden’s collaborators. As explained by the American businessman of Spanish origin Juan Verde, who is part of the advisory body of the White House Presidential Council for Exports, “this is a minority of businessmen who want wink at Trump hoping for benefit from ruthless deregulation that the candidate for the White House wants to apply. In fact, businessmen who support Trump often cite issues such as anti-Semitism, immigration, Biden’s lack of mental agility or foreign policy. Curiously, The economy is not usually a topic they refer to.
In reality, business support for Trump is, in many cases, “less enthusiastic than it seems,” according to an executive at a large Wall Street financial institution, who prefers not to give his name. “Many of those executives who support Trump tried to make the candidate DeSantis or Nikki Haley,” he adds. And he concludes with an argument to support his thesis: “The internal analyzes of the companies of all those trumpists indicate that the economic program that he would apply if he wins would be a disaster, because the combination of tax cuts and tariff increases would trigger inflation“.
There is also, simply, the ability to influence. In May, Trump asked oil companies for a billion dollars in donations to his campaign in exchange for launching an agenda favorable to that industry despite the fact that, under Biden, the United States has broken all world records for oil exports. The billionaire Jeff Yass has not only supported Trump, but has entered andn the capital of your social network Trump Social and, in return, he has managed to get the former president to go from being in favor of the ban on the TikTok platform, controlled by the Chinese state company ByteDance, to opening his own account on it.
The reason? Yass has $9.5 billion of his own and another $9.5 billion of his partners invested in ByteDance, and if TikTok is expelled from the United States, that investment will lose a considerable portion of its value. In his statement supporting Trump, Paulson warned against the imposition of economic sanctions on China, a country in which his family office (that is, the entity that manages his personal fortune) has large investments. In general, large US companies tend to donate to Republicans and Democrats, although the former tend to get the best of it thanks to their deregulatory agenda.
Trump maintains this liberalizing agenda and lower taxes on companies and capital, as he already did in his first term, although Their protectionism clashes with the interests of these great fortunes. Of course, many of them believe that, once he is in the White House, the Republican candidate will not implement the trade policies it threatensjust as he did not do so when he won in 2016.
The bad character of the presidential candidate
There are also more pragmatic elements such as, for example, the nature of the presidential candidate. “Trump has a lot of bad grapesso it’s better to have him on good terms in exchange for the promise to support him in case the White House decides to get even,” says the same person. Indeed, in his first term Trump did the impossible to ensure that Amazon will not win a public contract of 9.2 billion euros in 2020 because the main shareholder of that company, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of the Washington Postone of the newspapers that revealed the most scandals during his presidency.
The flood of millions of large donors to Trump has meant that, for the first time since the electoral race began, the former president will surpass Biden in May in terms of fundraising for his campaign. The 212 million dollars (198 million euros) that Trump raised are 29.5% of what Biden obtained. And the current president also has his share of rich people, starting with Mike Bloomberg (99 billion euros), founder and owner of the news agency that bears his name, and himself a candidate for the White House four years ago, who announced this week that he was going to give him $20 million.
The co-founder of the social network LinkedIn Reid Hoffman (2.4 billion euros) is another big donor to Biden. And Bill Gates’ ex-wife, Melinda French Gates (with a fortune of about 10.3 billion euros), expressed this week her support for the current president, although for now, as far as is known, she has not made any donation to Bill’s election campaign. the democrats.
The race of billionaires to support Biden or Trump reveals a system in which the ability to influence politicians is based on the contributions they make to their electoral teams. But, even assuming that, it is still surprising that Donald Trump has so much support – and, moreover, more and more – among those same elites that he claims to despise.
