...while the well-heeled elite cheer

“The revolt of the winners is getting harder to ignore,” said Brad Stone. Some of the people “who’ve seen their wealth grow propitiously in the past few years,” including Elon Musk, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, “are now among the loudest voices” torpedoing President Biden’s re-election prospects. They are “either overtly or quietly embracing the GOP nominee,” Donald Trump. Silicon Valley, especially, was until recently a Democratic bastion, but now “some of the most Trump-friendly voices,” like venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, “regularly excoriate Biden and his policies.” One explanation for the turnabout among the billionaire class is a “fear that the majority might be coming for their wealth.” But there are emotional factors, too. “Being contrarian and outrageous on social media” is a thrill few billionaires can replicate elsewhere, and it seems to have gone to their heads. A growing cohort, like Andreessen and Bill Ackman, have begun to “fulminate against the mainstream media” and elite universities. In that way, the billionaires “aren’t all that different from Trump’s main constituency of less-educated working-class white households.” Supporting Trump is “their way of flipping the proverbial bird to this real or imagined establishment,” even if it has been lining their pockets the whole time.