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0:00
Hello, I'm Prof. Anna Grosman,
and I teach at
Loughborough University.
Today, I will talk
about state capitalism,
and I will talk about
corporations as instruments
of state power.
0:15
To give you an illustration of
how important big corporations
can be to the government,
I would like to draw
your attention to
the big tech
representation in the US.
It exerts an unprecedented
influence of a
political discourse and
democracy all over the world,
and in particular, in the US.
You can see from this
slide that five of
the world's 10
richest billionaires
attended Trump's inauguration.
Tech billionaires like Elon
Musk, Mark Zuckerberg,
and Jeff Bezos were all
present at the ceremony
and represented a combined
wealth of over $1 trillion.
In yellow, you can see all
the tech billionaires.
Leading that list was Elon Musk,
who was, at the time, a
vocal Trump supporter
and whose net worth soared
61% to $426 billion,
after the 2024 election.
1:17
Elon Musk benefited due
to his past DOGE role
by attracting Chinese
capital to his companies.
That's just one of the
illustrations of how
his connections to
the US government
benefited his
private businesses.
Chinese investors
are precluded from
investing directly in US
businesses very often,
these kind of investments draw
a lot of scrutiny from
the US government.
They often use
special-purpose vehicles
(SPVs) to direct funds through
offshore Cayman Islands
into US-based private
equity funds,
which in turn invest
in US businesses.
In this case, they have
invested in Musk's ventures.
They bought more
than $30 million of
shares in various Elon
Musk-owned entities,
such as SpaceX,
xAI, and Neuralink,
through special
purpose vehicles.
This clearly demonstrates
that Elon Musk's role
at Dodge has attracted
Chinese capital to his
US-based companies.
