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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

The term "robber baron" sounds so impossibly dated it's hard to take it seriously, and "oligarch" seems to be the favored term for when people have corrupt business relations in enemy states, so perhaps using "oligarch" is more illuminating for a modern audience.

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You have Andrew Carnegie to thank for expensive marketing campaigns that retired that term in popular usage and rebranding robber barony under the philanthropist label. Now we have robber barons that look like they're trying to be nice.

“Captains of industry” also sounds faintly ridiculous for what it’s worth.

There are many synonyms for blasé corruption.

It seems hard to call big us ceos oligarchs, I would find it hard to believe for example Sundar pichai interacts even say weekly with Joe Biden, if for no other reason that there are so many potentially "influential" CEOs in the US and (at least there is a perception) they generally have better things to do than try to influence the president.

not sundar pichai, but someone like Larry fink is certainly an oligarch. He's also had access to the inner core of the establishment.

Oligarch implies the government grants and helps enforce a monopoly to a single individual. There are few, if any, individuals in America that this can apply to. There’s definitely regulatory capture in the US, but oligarch is hyperbole and/or a lack of perspective. It tends to be people equating US billionaires with Russian ones who definitely do fit this definition.

The specifics may differ but I do not agree that leaders of big business have "better things to do" than try to influence the President; a lot of time and money is spent on government influence operations.

> a lot of time and money is spent

I guess on reflection my parent description is not quite right, but your comment brings up maybe the real distinction: if you were a true oligarch, you wouldn't have do that, you would just have government influence, or, at least have it 'quite easily' for some definition of easily.

If Jamie Dimon gives the President (or one of his aides or some other well-placed official) a call, is he going to be completely unable to find an audience who will at least hear what he has to say? Probably not.

It would completely disingenuous to say that there's no difference between the US and Russia but I think there's more in common than we'd like to admit.

Spending lots of money counts as easy if you're ridiculously wealthy

It's not actually easy though. If someone airdropped you 100M and told you to spend it on some policy initiative, you, UtopiaPunk, would probably not be able to figure out how to move that money to a successful political end in DC.

He also probably doesn't employ a bunch of people specifically for this purpose so it seems like an irrelevant scenario

It can be argued that the United States government is at war with its citizens...

Oh, come on, you know what I mean. Russia or other places with unfavorable relationships with the West we hear about “oligarchs” regularly.

Of course, because you're listening to American media owned by American oligarchs

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