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 and buying big houses.
If we include newly elected President Donald J. Trump himself, there are at least a dozen billionaires among his Cabinet picks, who are on their way to senior positions in the new administration. Elon Musk tops the list with a net worth of $429 billion, according to Forbes, making him the richest man in the world. Mr. Trump weighs in with an estimated $6.8 billion.
It's an extraordinary concentration of wealth in a city where power has always been more important than money, but is now more intertwined with it than ever. Mr Trump campaigned as a populist defender of the American working class, but he has given some of his wealthiest donors leadership roles at the top of the government. Some will oversee the industries that produced their fortunes.
“It's tempting to compare this to the Gilded Age, but John D. Rockefeller didn't actually run McKinley's campaign or run for the White House,” said Michael Waldman, President Bill Clinton's chief speechwriter and now president and general director of the White House. the Brennan Center for Justice, which promotes justice system reforms and works to curb money in politics. He was referring to Mr. Musk, who has 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 consequences in Washington was an explosion in the luxury real estate market.
The financier Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump's pick to be commerce secretary (worth $1.5 billion, according to Forbes), last month closed on Fox anchor Bret Baier's French chateau-like home to Foxhall for $25 million Road, a record for the area. Scott Bessent, the nominee for Secretary of the Treasury (his financial statements show he is worth more than $700 million) has viewed a $7 million federal-style home on N Street in Georgetown, once the home of 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 identify the buyer, but they did say they were facing a shortage of trophy homes in Washington due to a second-term Trump bubble.
“We are truly overwhelmed by the level of prosperity that Washington has achieved since the election,” said Jim Bell, executive vice president of TTR Sotheby's International Realty. He said agents have resorted to calling their clients in Washington and asking if they are interested in selling to the newcomers.
Journalist and author Sally Quinn received such a call from an agent who told her she could get twice the price for the 18-room 1790s Georgetown house she shared with her husband, the late Benjamin C, for more than thirty years. Bradlee, the famous editor-in-chief of The Washington Post. The house was once owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln.
Ms. Quinn said she was happy to get the call, but adamant: “I said, 'Never.' This is my home.”
It is unclear where Musk will live in Washington, although there have been local media reports that he is trying to buy the Line Hotel in the bustling, bar-rich Adams Morgan neighborhood 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.
Musk is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Building across from the White House, as co-head of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. His partner in this effort is Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a net worth of $1 billion, according to Forbes, who also plans to run for governor of Ohio, a seat that will become vacant in 2026.
Jonathan Taylor, founder and managing partner of TTR Sotheby's, said the wealthy with connections to the government, even if they are not necessarily part of it, are moving here. “There are a lot of very wealthy people looking for a seat at the table,” he said.
That's not surprising, says David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the private equity Carlyle Group.
Major donors, he said, “would like to get the policies they believe in from the federal government — more oil drilling, simpler antitrust policies, more favorable crypto policies, less banking supervision.” They also want more support to help American companies invest abroad, and they want easy access to government officials.”
Housing in Washington was also a relative bargain for them, he said. “If you want to buy a house in New York or Southampton, a really good house, it could cost between $100 million and $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, Maryland, where he has lived for decades . He also owns the sprawling property in Nantucket that President Biden has used for Thanksgiving holidays with his family.
The Democrats have money too, although 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 commerce secretary for President Barack Obama and served as Mr. Biden's Special Representative for Ukraine's Economic Recovery. According to Forbes, she currently has a net worth of $4.1 billion.
Trump's billionaires have substantially larger assets than the top officials who came to Washington for his first term, which at the time was considered the richest administration in American history. Trump's first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, had assets between $289 million and $350 million in 2017. It took just over a year for Trump to fire him by tweet.
Some tech billionaires, who moved here in part to gain access to the White House and Congress as their industry came under increasing government scrutiny, have lived in Washington for years.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of The Washington Post, Amazon, paid $23 million in 2016 for the former 27,000-foot Textile Museum on a major street in the Kalorama neighborhood. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who gave more than $1 million to Trump in 2016, paid $13 million in 2021 for a home on Woodland Drive owned by Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary during Trump's first term. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, paid $15 million for the house across from Mrs. Quinn on N Street, where Jacqueline Kennedy lived briefly after her husband's assassination in 1963.
“These are really rich people,” said Kara Swisher, a journalist who covers the technology industry and is a former opinion writer for The New York Times. “As much as they would like to have the image that they don't spend a lot of money, they all really spend money. They all have private planes, they all have assistants, they have people who get them the kind of nuts they want.
The Washington neighborhoods in high demand, real estate agents said, were Kalorama, Massachusetts Avenue Heights, near the embassy street of the same name, and Georgetown, whose cobblestone streets were traditionally reserved for Washington's old elite. Not anymore, says Jamie Peva, a real estate agent with Washington Fine Properties who has been selling homes in Georgetown for 33 years.
“That whole WASP hegemony that started to decline in the '80s just kept declining,” he said. “Suddenly technology starts to make its appearance. It is a meritocracy.”
Some of the billionaires probably won't need houses in Washington. Charles Kushner, a real estate executive whose companies are worth $2.9 billion according to Forbes, will 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 final 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, will live in London as the US ambassador to Britain, according to Forbes. In 2016, Mr. Stephens gave $2 million to a group aimed at preventing Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination and in the 2024 primaries endorsed 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 worth $10.2 billion according to Forbes, will live in Rome as the U.S. ambassador to Italy.
Eric Lipton reporting contributed.
