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Corporations as instruments of state power: big tech and politics

Part 1 of 2
Published on April 30, 2026   14 min

A selection of talks on Strategy

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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.

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