Business
A Trump Oligarchy Is Moving to Washington, and Buying Up Prime Addresses
President Biden warned in his farewell address to the nation last week that an oligarchy is taking shape in America. In Washington, the oligarchs are already here, buying big houses.
Counting President-elect Donald J. Trump himself, there are at least a dozen billionaires among his cabinet picks and those headed for senior roles in the new administration. Elon Musk tops the list with a $429 billion net worth, according to Forbes, making him the world’s richest man. Mr. Trump weighs in with an estimated $6.8 billion.
It is an extraordinary concentration of wealth in a city where power has always been more important than money, but is now more than ever intertwined with it. Mr. Trump campaigned as a populist defender of the American working class, but he has put some of his richest donors in commanding roles in the top reaches of government. A number will oversee the very industries that produced their fortunes.
“It’s tempting to liken this to the Gilded Age, but John D. Rockefeller didn’t actually run McKinley’s campaign or move into the White House,” said Michael Waldman, who was President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter and is now president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice, which promotes legal system reforms and works to curb money in politics. He was referring to Mr. Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help Mr. Trump win and is now expected to have an office in the White House complex.
One of the most immediate effects in Washington has been an explosion in the luxury real estate market.
The financier Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s choice to be commerce secretary (worth $1.5 billion, according to Forbes), last month closed on the French Chateau-style home of the Fox anchor Bret Baier on Foxhall Road for $25 million, a record for the area. Scott Bessent, the nominee for Treasury secretary (his financial disclosure statement shows he is worth in excess of $700 million) has looked at a $7 million Federal-style house on N Street in Georgetown, once the home of the syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop.
The 1850 Italianate-style Georgetown home of the late Boyden Gray, an influential lawyer for Republican presidents, sold last month for $10.5 million. Real estate agents would not disclose the buyer, but they did say they were running short of trophy houses in Washington because of a second-term Trump bump.
“We’ve really been overwhelmed by the wealth factor that has come to Washington since the election,” said Jim Bell, an executive vice president of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. He said agents have resorted to calling their Washington clients and asking if they’d be interested in selling to the newcomers.
The journalist and author Sally Quinn got one such call from an agent who told her she could get twice the price for the 18-room, 1790s Georgetown home she shared for more than 30 years with her husband, the late Benjamin C. Bradlee, the famed executive editor of The Washington Post. The house was once owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son.
Ms. Quinn said she was happy to get the call, but adamant: “I said, ‘Never.’ This is my home.”
It is unclear where Mr. Musk will live in Washington, although there are local media reports that he is trying to buy the Line Hotel in the buzzy, bar-heavy neighborhood of Adams Morgan and turn it into a private club. A spokeswoman for Mr. Musk, the Tesla founder whose rocket company, Space X, has billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Building across from the White House as the co-leader of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. His partner in the effort is Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a net worth of $1 billion, according to Forbes, who is also planning to run for governor of Ohio, a seat that becomes open in 2026.
Jonathan Taylor, a founder and managing partner of TTR Sotheby’s, said that the rich with connections to the administration, although not necessarily a part of it, are moving here too. “There are a lot of very wealthy people looking for a seat at the table,” he said.
That is hardly surprising, said David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the private equity Carlyle Group.
Big donors, he said, “would like to get the policies they believe in from the federal government — more oil drilling, easier antitrust policy, more favorable crypto policy, less bank oversight. They also want more support for helping American companies invest overseas, and have ready access to government officials.”
Washington housing, he said, was also a relative bargain for them. “If you want to buy a home in New York or Southampton, a really good house, it could cost $100 million to $150 million,” he said. “You can’t spend $25 million in Washington even if you try.”
Mr. Rubenstein, who served as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, said he looked at Mr. Baier’s house when it was on the market but decided to stay in the home in Bethesda, Md., where he has lived for decades. He also owns the sprawling compound in Nantucket that President Biden has used for his family Thanksgiving vacations.
Democrats have money too, although Mr. Biden’s Cabinet is largely filled with single- and double-digit millionaires. His current White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zeints, listed assets ranging from $68 million to $338 million on his 2024 financial disclosure form. One outlier is Penny Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune who was a commerce secretary for President Barack Obama and served as Mr. Biden’s special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery. She has a current net worth of $4.1 billion, according to Forbes.
Mr. Trump’s billionaires have substantially bigger assets than those top officials who came to Washington for his first term, which was considered the wealthiest administration in American history at the time. Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil, had assets of between $289 million and $350 million in 2017. He lasted a little more than a year before Mr. Trump fired him by tweet.
Some tech billionaires, who moved here in part to have access to the White House and Congress as their industry came under growing government scrutiny, have been in Washington for years.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, paid $23 million in 2016 for the former 27,000-foot Textile Museum on a grand street in the Kalorama neighborhood. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who donated more than $1 million to Mr. Trump in 2016, paid $13 million in 2021 for a home on Woodland Drive owned by Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce in Mr. Trump’s first term. Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, paid $15 million for the home across from Ms. Quinn on N Street, where Jacqueline Kennedy lived for a short time after her husband’s assassination in 1963.
“These are really rich people,” said Kara Swisher, a journalist who chronicles the tech industry and is a former opinion writer for The New York Times. “As much as they like to have an image of not being spendy, they’re all really spendy. They all have private planes, they all have assistants, they have people who get them the kind of nuts they want.”
Washington neighborhoods in high demand, real estate agents said, were Kalorama, Massachusetts Avenue Heights off the embassy-lined street of the same name, and Georgetown, whose cobblestone lanes were traditionally the preserve of Washington’s old-line elite. Not anymore, said Jamie Peva, a real estate agent with Washington Fine Properties who has sold houses in Georgetown for 33 years.
“That whole WASP hegemony that started to decline in the ’80s just continued to decline,” he said. “All of a sudden tech starts to come in. It’s a meritocracy.”
A few of the billionaires will presumably not need homes in Washington. Charles Kushner, a real estate executive whose companies are worth $2.9 billion, according to Forbes, is to live in Paris as the U.S. ambassador to France. Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Kushner, a major donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign, in the last days of his first term. In 2004, Mr. Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion, retaliating against a federal witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission.
Warren Stephens, an investment banker worth $3.3 billion, according to Forbes, is to live in London as the U.S. ambassador to Britain. In 2016, Mr. Stephens gave $2 million to a group aiming to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination and in the 2024 primaries backed Republican candidates other than Mr. Trump. In April, after it became clear that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Mr. Stephens donated more than $3 million to his campaign.
Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets and a longtime Republican donor who is worth $10.2 billion, according to Forbes, is set to live in Rome as the U.S. ambassador to Italy.
Eric Lipton contributed reporting.
In an expansion of its business of processing pharmaceuticals in Earth’s orbit, Varda Space Industries is renting a large El Segundo plant where toy manufacturer Mattel used to design Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls.
The plant in El Segundo’s aerospace corridor will be an extension of Varda Space Industries’ headquarters in a much smaller building on nearby Aviation Boulevard.
Varda will occupy a 205,443-square-foot industrial and office campus at 2031 E. Mariposa Ave., which will give it additional capacity to manufacture spacecraft at scale, the company said.
Originally built in the 1940s as an aircraft facility, the complex has a history as part of aerospace and defense industries that have long shaped the South Bay and is near a host of major defense and space contractors. It is also close to Los Angeles Air Force Base, headquarters to the Space Systems Command.
Workers test AstroForge’s Odin asteroid probe, which was lost in space after launch this year.
(Varda Space Industries)
Varda is one of a new generation of aerospace startups that have flourished in Southern California and the South Bay over the last several years, particularly in El Segundo, often with ties to SpaceX.
Elon Musk’s company, founded in 2002 in El Segundo, has revolutionized the industry with reusable rockets that have radically lowered the cost of lifting payloads into space. Though it has moved its headquarters to Texas, SpaceX retains large-scale operations in Hawthorne.
Varda co-founder and Chief Executive Will Bruey is a former SpaceX avionics engineer, and the company’s spacecraft are launched on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Varda makes automated labs that look like cylindrical desktop speakers, which it sends into orbit in capsules and satellite platforms it also builds. There, in microgravity, the miniature labs grow molecular crystals that are purer than those produced in Earth’s gravity for use in pharmaceuticals.
It has contracts with drug companies and also the military, which tests technology at hypersonic speeds as the capsules return to Earth.
Its fifth capsule was launched in November and returned to Earth in late January; its next mission is set in the coming weeks. Varda has more than 10 missions scheduled on Falcon 9s through 2028.
For the last several decades, the Mariposa Avenue property served as the research and development center for Mattel Toys. El Segundo has also long been a center for the toy industry as companies like to set up shop in the shadow of Mattel.
The Mattel facility “has always been an exceptional property with a legacy tied to aerospace innovation, and leasing to Varda Space Industries feels like a natural continuation of that story,” said Michael Woods, a partner at GPI Cos., which owns the property.
“We are proud to support a company that is genuinely pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and are excited to watch Varda grow and thrive here in El Segundo,” Woods said.
As one of the country’s most active hubs of aerospace and defense innovation, El Segundo has seen its industrial property vacancy fall to 3.4% on demand from space companies, government contractors and technology startups, real estate brokerage CBRE said.
Successful startups often have to leave the neighborhood when they want to expand, real estate broker Bob Haley of CBRE said. The 9-acre Mattel facility was big enough to keep Varda in the city.
Last year, Varda subleased about 55,000 square feet of lab space from alternative protein company Beyond Meat at 888 Douglas St. in El Segundo, which it started moving into in June.
Varda will get the keys to its new building in December and spend four to eight months building production and assembly facilities as it ramps up operations. By the end of next year, it expects to have constructed 10 more spacecraft.
In the future, Varda could consolidate offices there, given its size. Currently, though, the plan is to retain all properties, creating a campus of three buildings within a mile of one another that are served by the company’s transportation services, Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Barr said.
“We already have Varda-branded shuttles running up and down Aviation Boulevard,” he said.
Ships near the Strait of Hormuz before and after attacks began
Every day, around 80 oil and gas tankers typically pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast that carries a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant amount of natural gas.
On Monday, just two oil and gas tankers appear to have crossed the strait, according to a New York Times analysis of shipping activity from Kpler, an industry data firm. Since then, one tanker passed through.
“It’s a de facto closure,” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer of Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm. “You’ve got a significant number of vessels on either side of the strait but no one is willing to go through.”
Tankers have been staying away from Hormuz since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran that began on Saturday. A prolonged conflict could ripple broadly across the global economy, threatening the energy supplies of countries halfway around the world and stoking inflation.
International oil prices have climbed 12 percent since the fighting began, trading Tuesday around $81 a barrel, and natural gas prices have surged in Europe and in Asia.
A senior Iranian military official threatened on Monday to “set on fire” any ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels in the region have already come under attack. Several oil and gas facilities have also been struck or affected by nearby shelling, though the damage did not initially appear to be catastrophic.
Where ships and energy facilities have been damaged
A fire broke out Tuesday at a major energy hub in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, from the falling debris of a downed drone, the authorities said. On Monday, Qatar halted production of liquefied natural gas, or fuel that has been cooled so that it can be transported on ships, after attacks on its facilities.
The sharp reduction in tanker traffic is reducing the supply of oil and gas to world markets, pushing up prices for both commodities. And the longer that ships stay away from the Strait of Hormuz, the less oil and gas get out to the world, which could raise prices even more.
Shipping companies have paused their tankers to protect their crew and cargo, and because insurance companies are charging significantly more to cover vessels in the conflict area.
On Tuesday, President Trump said that “if necessary,” the U.S. Navy would begin escorting tankers through the strait. He also said a U.S. government agency would begin offering “political risk insurance” to shipping lines in the area.
In addition to tankers, other large vessels regularly go through the strait, including car carriers and container ships. In normal conditions, nearly 160 make the trip each day.
Some ships in the region turn off the devices that broadcast their positions, while others transmit false locations — making it hard to give a full picture of the traffic in the strait.
The Shiva is a small oil tanker that has repeatedly faked its location, according to TankerTrackers.com, which tracks global oil shipments. It is suspected of carrying sanctioned Iranian oil, according to Kpler. The Shiva was one of the two tankers that crossed the strait on Monday.
The oil and gas that typically move through the strait come from big producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and United Arab Emirates, and are exported around the world.
Where tankers moving through the Strait have traveled
In 2024, more than 80 percent of the oil and gas transported through the Strait of Hormuz went to Asia. China, India, Japan and South Korea were the top importers, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Countries have energy stockpiles that could last them into the coming months, but a continued shutdown of the strait could damage their economies.
Several big disruptions have roiled supply chains in recent years, but the tanker standstill in the Strait of Hormuz could have an outsize impact.
Paramount Skydance’s jubilation over its come-from-behind victory to claim Warner Bros. Discovery has entered a new phase:
Call it the deal-debt hangover.
Two major ratings agencies have raised concerns about Paramount’s credit because of the enormous debt the David Ellison-led company will have to shoulder — at least $79 billion — once it absorbs the larger Warner Bros. Discovery, bringing CNN, HBO, TBS and Cartoon Network into the Paramount fold.
Fitch Ratings said Monday that it placed Paramount on its “negative” ratings watch, and downgraded its credit to BB+ from BBB-, which puts the company’s credit into “junk” territory. Fitch said it took action due to “uncertainty” surrounding Paramount’s $110-billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, which the boards of both companies approved on Friday.
S&P Global Ratings took similar action.
To finance the Warner takeover, Ellison’s billionaire father, Larry Ellison, has agreed to guarantee the $45.7 billion in equity needed. Bank of America, Citibank and Apollo Global have agreed to provide Paramount with more than $54 billion in debt financing.
“Potential credit risks include the prospective debt-funded structure, Fitch’s expectation of materially elevated leverage and limited visibility on post-transaction financial policy and capital structure,” Fitch said.
Late last week, Paramount sent $2.8 billion to Netflix as a “termination fee” to officially end the streaming giant’s pursuit of Warner Bros. That payment paved the way for Warner and Paramount’s board to enter into the new merger agreement.
Paramount hopes the merger will be wrapped up by the end of September. It needs the approval of Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders and regulators, including the European Union.
Paramount executives acknowledged this week the new company would emerge with $79 billion in debt — a considerably higher total than what Warner Bros. Discovery had following its spinoff from AT&T. That 2022 transaction left Warner Bros. Discovery with nearly $55 billion of debt, a burden that led to endless waves of cost-cutting, including thousands of layoffs and dozens of canceled projects.
Warner still has $33.5 billion in debt, a lingering legacy that will be passed on to Paramount.
Paramount plans to restructure about $15 billion in Warner Bros. Discovery’s existing debt.
Paramount CEO David Ellison at a 2024 movie premiere for a Netflix show.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)
Paramount told Wall Street it would find more than $6 billion in cost cuts or “synergies” within three years — a number that has weighed heavily on entertainment industry workers, particularly in Los Angeles.
Hollywood already is reeling from previous mergers in addition to a sharp pullback in film and television production locally as filmmakers chase tax credits offered overseas and in other states, including New York and New Jersey.
Some entertainment executives, including Netflix Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos, have speculated that Paramount will need to find more than $10 billion in cost cuts to make the math work. More recently, Sarandos went higher, telling Bloomberg News that Paramount may need $16 billion in cuts.
Cognizant of widespread fears about additional layoffs, Paramount Chief Operating Officer Andrew Gordon took steps this week to try to tamp down such concerns.
Gordon is a former Goldman Sachs banker and a former executive with RedBird Capital Partners, an investor in Paramount and the proposed Warner Bros. deal. He joined Paramount last August as part of the Ellison takeover.
During a conference call Monday with analysts, Gordon said Paramount would look beyond the workforce for cuts because the company wants to maintain its film and TV production levels.
Paramount plans to look for cost savings by consolidating the “technology stacks and cloud providers” for its streaming services, including Paramount+ and HBO Max, Gordon said. The company also would search for reductions in corporate overhead, marketing expenses, procurement, business services and “optimizing the combined real estate footprint.”
It’s unclear whether Paramount would sell the historic Melrose Avenue lot or simply centralize the sprawling operations onto the Warner Bros. and Paramount lots in Burbank and Hollywood.
Workers are scattered throughout the region.
HBO, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, maintains its West Coast headquarters in Culver City; CBS television stations operate from CBS’ former lot off Radford Avenue in Studio City; and CBS Entertainment and Paramount cable channels executive teams are located in a high-rise off Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, blocks from the Paramount movie studio lot.
“The combination of PSKY and WBD could create a materially stronger business than either individual entity,” Standard & Poor’s said in its note to investors. “However, this transaction presents unique challenges because it would involve the combination of three companies, with the smallest, Skydance, being the controlling entity.”
David Ellison’s production firm, Skydance Media, was the entity that bought Paramount, creating Paramount Skydance.
Ellison has not announced what the combined company will be called.
Paramount shares closed down more than 6% Tuesday to $12.45.
Warner Bros. Discovery fell 1% to $28.20. Netflix added less than 1% to close at $97.70.
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