100 People Who Actually Rule the World
This list is a field guide to the 100 oligarchs fighting the Capitalist Civil War — mapped across the four factions tearing the global order apart.
This is a representative selection — not exhaustive, not a ranking. The Transnational Capitalist Class numbers roughly 3400 billionaires and another difficult to calculate number of members who are politically-connected individuals with billionaire-level clout and influence. The recent Forbes billionaires list claims there are 3428 billionaires with a total wealth increase of 28% from the previous year. Elon Musk leads the list with a net worth of $839 billion, followed by Larry Page ($257 billion), Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), and Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion).
In reality, the politically consequential top tier is closer to 300–500 individuals. The names below are split up to reflect membership in the Four Factions. The factions are evolving and emerging — some members are in more than one faction and others cross the floor.
I have included links to their Wikipedia bios for further exploration.
Davos Faction (Stakeholder Capitalist Globalists)
The financial-managerial wing of the TCC. Their factional identity is institutional integration with the post-1989 multilateral order — asset management (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), central bank networks, climate-finance architecture, multilateral institutions, philanthro-capitalist infrastructure.
Larry Fink — BlackRock
Mark Carney — Canadian PM, the faction’s current synthesizer
Klaus Schwab — WEF founder, symbolic anchor
Bill Gates — Gates Foundation
Michael Bloomberg — Bloomberg LP
Jamie Dimon — JPMorgan Chase
Christine Lagarde — ECB
Mukesh Ambani — Reliance (Davos-aligned commercial wing of Indian capital)
Bernard Arnault — LVMH
Marc Benioff — Salesforce
Ray Dalio — Bridgewater
Warren Buffett — Berkshire Hathaway
Michael Sabia — Clerk of the Privy Council, Carney’s Canadian network
Marc-André Blanchard — Chief of Staff to PM Carney, Carney’s Canadian network
Mark Wiseman — Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., BlackRock alumnus
Brian Moynihan — Bank of America
David Solomon — Goldman Sachs
Jane Fraser — Citigroup
Børge Brende — WEF president
Kristalina Georgieva — IMF
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — WTO
Ajay Banga — World Bank
Chrystia Freeland — Canadian Liberal, the faction’s most ideologically committed elected official
François-Henri Pinault — Kering
George Soros / Alex Soros — Open Society network (faction-adjacent, distinct political project)
Imperial Nationalists
The hard-power faction: military-industrial integration, settler-nationalist political projects, decoupling and tariff hawks, neoconservative networks. Organized around the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Membership defined by political project, not industry or demography.
Donald Trump — President; the faction’s most consequential political-businessman
Benjamin Netanyahu — the faction’s organizing political figure
Narendra Modi — Indian PM, the Hindu nationalist regional variant
Miriam Adelson — Las Vegas Sands, the most consequential single political donor
Robert Mercer / Rebekah Mercer — Renaissance Technologies, nationalist-right political infrastructure
Paul Singer — Elliott Management, neoconservative donor anchor
Charles Koch — Koch network’s Imperial Nationalist-realigned remnant
The Murdoch family (Rupert, Lachlan) — News Corp/Fox, faction media apparatus
Gautam Adani — Adani Group, Indian conglomerate aligned with Modi project
Bernard Marcus estate network — Republican Jewish Coalition infrastructure
Idan Ofer — Israeli shipping/energy
Yitzhak Tshuva — Delek Group, Israeli energy
Patrick Drahi — Altice, French-Israeli telecom-media
Jared Kushner — Affinity Partners, Gulf-Israeli normalization architect
Howard Lutnick — Cantor Fitzgerald, Commerce Secretary
Scott Bessent — Treasury Secretary, hard-decoupling hawk
Bill Ackman — Pershing Square, post-October 2023 Zionist political operator
Marc Rowan — Apollo Global, Israeli political activism
Robert Kraft — Patriots/FCAS, pro-Israel political infrastructure
Haim Saban — Saban Capital Group, bipartisan Israeli political donor
JD Vance — Vice President, faction’s elected representative
Larry Ellison — Oracle, Trump-aligned with pro-Israeli activism (cross-cuts Silicon Valley)
John Hagee / Christians United for Israel — Christian Zionist mass-mobilization apparatus (network, not individual billionaire)
Viktor Orbán‘s circle / CPAC Hungary network — European variant
Stephen Schwarzman — Blackstone, Trump-aligned despite Davos commercial overlap
Silicon Valley (Techno-Sovereigns)
The newest faction. Network State ideology, administrative-state demolition, AI/biotech/aerospace concentration, libertarian-to-reactionary political project. Membership defined by both industry concentration (tech and tech-adjacent capital) and ideological commitment to the techno-sovereign (Techno-Optimist, Network State) project.
Peter Thiel — Palantir/Founders Fund, the faction’s network anchor
Elon Musk — Tesla/SpaceX/X/xAI, most visible operator (currently ambiguous alignment)
Marc Andreessen — Andreessen Horowitz, intellectual operator
David Sacks — Craft Ventures, Trump’s AI/crypto czar
Joe Lonsdale — 8VC/Palantir cofounder
JD Vance — Vice President (cross-listed; primary commitment Imperial Nationalist, formation Silicon Valley)
Alex Karp — Palantir CEO
Curtis Yarvin — house philosopher (not a billionaire but the faction’s intellectual architect)
Balaji Srinivasan — Network State author
Brian Armstrong — Coinbase, crypto-political infrastructure
Palmer Luckey — Anduril
Trae Stephens — Anduril/Founders Fund
Keith Rabois — Khosla Ventures alumnus, Founders Fund
Garry Tan — Y Combinator
Larry Page — Google cofounder (retired but structurally significant)
Sergey Brin — Google cofounder
Jensen Huang — Nvidia (commercially central, factionally moderate)
Mark Zuckerberg — Meta (recently realigning toward faction’s political project)
Sam Altman — OpenAI (faction-adjacent with Davos sympathies)
Vinod Khosla — Khosla Ventures (partial, Davos sympathies)
Jack Dorsey — Block, libertarian-aligned
Patrick Collison — Stripe
John Collison — Stripe
Dustin Moskovitz — Asana/Open Philanthropy (faction-divergent, more Davos-adjacent)
Brian Chesky — Airbnb
State Capitalists
The faction operating through party-state structures rather than individual capital command. Centered on China, with allied state-capitalist projects in Russia, Iran and the Gulf forming an an extended bloc whose BRICS-era political coherence has now visibly failed. The faction’s internal structure is asymmetric — China’s CCP elite is the analytical core; Russia and the Gulf are aligned counterparties whose membership is partial and project-dependent.
China (faction core):
Xi Jinping — General Secretary, internal agglutinator
Li Qiang — Premier
Ding Xuexiang — First Vice Premier
He Lifeng — Vice Premier for economy/trade
Wang Huning — chief party theorist, ideological architect
Cai Qi — Politburo Standing Committee
Pan Gongsheng — PBOC Governor
Lan Fo’an — Finance Minister
Wang Wentao — Commerce Minister
Pony Ma (Ma Huateng) — Tencent
Zhang Yiming — ByteDance
Zhong Shanshan — Nongfu Spring
Wang Chuanfu — BYD
Robin Zeng — CATL
Ren Zhengfei — Huawei
Jack Ma — Alibaba (post-2020 reduced but structurally significant)
Jin Liqun — AIIB President, faction’s multilateral institution
Russia (allied state-capitalist project, increasingly cross-cutting with Imperial Nationalism via war economy):
Vladimir Putin — President, the BRICS-era agglutinator whose binding power has just visibly failed
Sergey Lavrov — Foreign Minister, faction diplomat
Igor Sechin — Rosneft, oil state capital
Alexey Miller — Gazprom
Yury Kovalchuk — “Bank Rossiya” oligarch, ideological hardliner
Gulf state capital (allied, cross-cuts Imperial Nationalism through Israel normalization):
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — Saudi Crown Prince, directs $1.15T PIF; operates across factions — State Capitalist in domestic-developmental mode, Imperial Nationalist on regional security, Davos-courting on global capital deployment
Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) — UAE President, directs ADIA (~$1T) and Mubadala
Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani — Qatari Emir, directs QIA (~$525B)
Yasir Al-Rumayyan — PIF Governor, operational head of Saudi state capital deployment
Overlapping and Hybrid Faction Members
These factions are not all nations with flags. The Imperialists are dominated by the Trump-Netanyahu national coalition and the State Capitalists are dominated by China-CCP, but Davos and Silicon Valley have no national flag or club badge to wear, so they can more easily slide into another faction. Loyalties are fluid.
Several figures in the Davos sample (Schwarzman, Ackman) operate in the Imperial Nationalist overlap. Several figures in the Silicon Valley sample (Ellison, Karp, increasingly Andreessen on Israel-related questions) operate at the Silicon Valley–Imperial Nationalist overlap. Elon Musk has his hands in all the factions, though he is born a Silicon Valley boy.
This cross-cutting pattern is my book’s evidence that the factional civil war is partly a realignment in progress rather than a fixed balance of power.
The Gulf monarchies are the clearest junction zone where all four factions compete for influence. MBS, MBZ, and Tamim each maintain operative relationships with all four factions and align differently depending on the issue: with Davos on global capital deployment and ESG framing, with Imperial Nationalists on Israel normalization and Iran containment, with Silicon Valley on AI infrastructure (HUMAIN, G42), with State Capitalists on Belt and Road and BRICS+. They function as a swing bloc.
Russia under Putin has migrated factionally over the past decade. Pre-2022 Russia operated as a recognizably State Capitalist project with parallels to China. Post-2022, the war economy has restructured Russian capital around military production, oligarch reorganization, and territorial revanchism — a factional drift toward Imperial Nationalism in character, but not joining the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Putin’s “agglutinator” failure on Iran is partly a consequence of this drift: the State Capitalist project requires economic-developmental coherence, and Russia no longer has one.
India under Modi is in active migration from Davos-curious to Imperial Nationalist. The February 2026 Knesset address and the post-Iran-war BRICS defection are the two visible milestones of this migration. The Adani–Ambani capital base is split: Ambani remains Davos-integrated; Adani has migrated toward the Imperial Nationalist alignment via Modi–Trump–Netanyahu coordination.
The State Capitalist faction is the most internally coherent because it operates through party-state discipline rather than individual factional commitment. This is its strength and its limit. The faction cannot recruit transnational class members in the way Davos can; its expansion runs through state-to-state agreements rather than class formation.
What follows is the series so far. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.
INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War
CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War
CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class
(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe
CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?
CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class
(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven
CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party
(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking
CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?
(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit
CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry
(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.
Yep.
Nope.