Trump’s is a golden age for the big tech, big energy coalition
Half a century ago, US arms control expert Richard J. Barnet wrote in The Economy of Death that ‘Nations, like families, reveal themselves through budgets. No personal document tells more about a man’s values or his hopes and fears then the family budget. Similarly, the way to size up a nation is to examine the national budget.’ It’s an observation that applies well to the Trump administration, with its US$1.5 trillion defence budget request for 2027. The eye-watering amount is 44 per cent higher than the previous year. Trump may be a populist in his personal antics and his rhetoric about supporting ‘warfighters and their families’, but spending on personnel increases by just four per cent. Trump’s real commitment lies elsewhere.
There are plans for a missile defence system called Golden Dome, a ‘Trump Class’ of new battleships called the Golden Fleet, and a new generation of fighter aircraft known as the F-47. It’s a Golden Age for big defence stocks, which had an exceptionally strong run in the first year of his current term as president. They outperformed both the S&P 500 and the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 indexes. There was investor interest in smaller upstarts too, buoyed by Trump’s spending on drones, military software and surveillance technologies.
Behind his mastery of the art of distraction, there is a coherent strategy at work. Trump represents the interests of a coalition of elite investors who funded his political campaigns and brought him to power. Centred around a symbiotic relationship between Big Tech and Big Energy, their economic interests are more predictable than the president’s deliberately distracting utterances.
Cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, drones and space
Big Tech is an umbrella term that includes four key sectors: cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, drones and space (CADS). Trump denounced cryptocurrencies in his first term as president, declaring on X in 2019:
I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity…We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!
But when money talks, the rhetoric walks. Trump decided to become a crypto advocate when the crypto industry lined up behind his re-election campaign. He delivered the keynote address at Bitcoin 2024, the industry’s biggest Bitcoin event, promising to fire Joe Biden’s regulators and establish a national strategic Bitcoin stockpile. As Jacob Silverman shows in his 2025 book Gilded Rage, Trump attended fundraisers with crypto industry figures such as David Sacks and ‘listened as a roomful of centi-millionaires and billionaires urged him to name J. D. Vance, a venture capitalist and Peter Thiel disciple, to be his vice-presidential running mate’. It is a transactional relationship. The key consideration is money. ‘We’ll get richer if he wins’, as one private equity executive put it to the Financial Times in 2024. (In public, this is pronounced as ‘saving Western civilisation’.)
Sacks had supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and denounced Trump after the riots in Washington, D.C. in January 2021. But that was then, and this is now. President Trump became the industry’s top policymaker, appointing Sacks as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar. Trump issued an executive order to shut down the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which investigated crypto crimes. His sons are now major crypto dealers through their business ventures. Donald Jr and Barron are co-founders of World Liberty Financial, headed up by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff. Their firm received a $US 2 billion deposit from Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who controls $US 1.5 trillion of the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth. As Forbes magazine reported on 9 September 2025, Trump ‘had the most lucrative year of his life’ in 2025. He vaulted 118 spots on the Forbes list of billionaires, landing at no. 201 with US $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024, when he was still running for office.
Donald Trump’s cabinet is the wealthiest in modern history, with a combined net worth of $US 60 billion—five hundred times richer than the $US 118 million combined net worth of President Joe Biden’s cabinet. It includes major campaign fundraising organisers such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a billionaire, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, an extremely wealthy hedge fund manager.
Artificial intelligence, drones and space
The Trump administration showers money on the newly established Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG). As reported by Jeremy Hsu in Ars Technica on 22 April 2026, the $1.5 trillion budget this year includes $53.6 billion to make and buy drones, counter-drone systems, and a logistics network to support them. It is a remarkable 236-fold increase from the US$226 million it received last year. An additional US$20.6 billion will go to the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program for drone prototypes capable of teaming up with human-piloted fighter jets. It will also fund the US Navy’s Boeing MQ-25 drone for mid-air refuelling of carrier-borne fighter aircraft to extend their strike ranges. All up, the drone-related spending matches the entire budget of the US Marine Corps and is almost entirely devoted to buying existing drone and autonomous warfare technologies. That tells suppliers that they can expand their production facilities with confidence. There are other subsidies for the US industrial base that manufactures these weapon systems.
Here too, Trump is rewarding his campaign contributors such as OpenAI President Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreeson. Federal campaign finance records analysed by NBC News show that Brockman gave $12.5 million to the Trump SuperPAC. His wife, Anna, made an identical donation on the same day. OpenAI stands to benefit hugely from the artificial intelligence boom. Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the United States. He signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission, a massive federal effort to support American artificial intelligence research by expanding computational resources, increasing access to federal datasets, and funding scientific applications to advance discoveries.
Financier Marc Andreessen, who endorsed Trump in 2024, had backed Clinton in 2016 because he disliked Trump’s immigration policies. In July 2025, his firm led ‘the largest seed funding round in history’ for AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, valuing the firm at US$12 billion. Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, once waited in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand. He had quit Trump’s business advisory council over his climate change policies in 2017. But he donated heavily to Trump in 2024 and used his social media platform X to broadcast and amplify pro-Trump messages. Musk plans to support Trump and the Republican Party again at the midterm elections in November 2026. The total value of his companies’ contracts with the Pentagon is estimated at billions of dollars. As Reuters reported, however, ‘the true figure cannot be determined since many of them are classified’.
Musk’s small government ‘libertarian’ rhetoric sits alongside at least $38 billion he and his businesses received in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, according to analysis by the Washington Post. Tesla would have lost more than US$700 million in 2020, a seventh consecutive year without profits, but government regulatory credits allowed the company to report a profit of US$862 million. Government support, often at critical moments, helped Musk ‘seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person’.
Big Tech requires Big Energy
Being pro-crypto and pro-AI means being pro-Big Energy. The relationship is inherent in the technology itself. Crypto and artificial intelligence require astronomical amounts of electricity. For cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, thousands of computers (‘Bitcoin miners’) compete to solve cryptographic puzzles. Solving these puzzles is how the system creates trust without a central authority. Doing so requires billions of attempts per second globally, all of which require electricity. Artificial intelligence has huge energy demands because it requires dense clusters of graphical processing units (GPUs) that operate simultaneously, sometimes for weeks at a time. GPUs are fundamentally different from traditional central processing units (CPUs), which operate sequentially rather than simultaneously. Training a large language model can consume hundreds of megawatt-hours of electricity in a data centre.
The push towards larger AI models has seen an explosion in data centre construction projects, such as Hyperion, Meta’s planned 5-gigawatt data centre in Louisiana. Hyperion will be joined by dozens of similar projects. The Trump administration is a critically important vanguard for these initiatives, blocking individual states from regulating them, rolling back environmental reviews, and providing federal public lands for data centre construction.
Not fascism but a kleptocracy
Trump follows a time-tested plan to advance the technology moguls’ cause: public subsidy, private profit. It is a mistake to describe this as fascism. Fascism is a political ideology with an economic program: namely, that a powerful state led by a ruling party and an all-powerful leader should command the society, the economy and the corporate bosses. The Trump presidency has the opposite program—more like a wealthy kleptocracy where the state apparatus bows to serve the super-rich.
US competition with China ensures an atmosphere of tension that justifies disguised subsidies to an array of high-technology corporations. The US Space Force subsidises the future space and near-Earth economy with massive computational power to track satellites, monitor orbital debris and enhance space domain awareness. A supercomputer at the Pentagon runs complex epidemiological models for biodefence, ensuring a disguised subsidy for drug discovery. A supercomputer at the Air Force Research Laboratory subsidises aerodynamics, propulsion and thermal management through funding for hypersonic weapons research. A supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—under a program to fund nuclear weapons research—subsidises research on how materials and systems perform under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
Trump, like his predecessors, but now in overdrive, uses the Pentagon model of state-assisted capital formation to facilitate US global military presence, while excluding the public from participating in decisions about domestic economic policy.