Since Trump wants to create America’s first oligopoly, here is an Oligarch ETF that would allow average people to cash in on the unprecedented corruption of the federal government
Since the financial services industry is always looking for new products, here is a suggestion for some Trump Oligarch ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) that should attract average investors.
The Trump Oligarch ETF is based on underlying companies whose owners or top shareholders donated a minimum of $1 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. In exchange for these donations, any astute multimillionaire would expect favorable treatment from the federal government for donating to Trump.
In return, the billionaire owners of these corporations should receive favorable regulatory treatments, tax breaks, immunity from antitrust investigations, more federal contracts, non-prosecution of labor, workplace OSHA, and environmental violations.
According to Forbes, “26 billionaires have already given more than $1 million apiece to pro-Trump PACs and committees.” However, ten billionaires have privately held companies, so they cannot participate in the ETFs.
But that still leaves 16 companies for the ETF. The underlying companies’ ETFs are diversified in the following industries: casinos, finance, and oil and gas.
Even better, since Trump has a verified and solid record of bankrupting companies and making them worthless, the Trump Oligarch ETF would be managed by outside investment professionals, so it has an exponentially better chance of succeeding than if Trump had anything to do with it. Plus, in the Trump administration, “greed is good,” and donors to Trump are well-known as being some of the greediest people in the Top 1% of Americans. That’s why they should benefit from the looting and receive the spoils of Trump’s presidency.
Now, as Trump reshapes America into an unregulated oligopoly as part of what the Marxists call “monopoly capitalism,” this last stage of capitalism will look like the Sodom and Gemorrah of financial engineering and elevate greed into the Republican Party’s new Golden Calf. Looking ahead, there will not be any safeguards against mergers and antitrust. This leaves entire industries to be consolidated as part of monopoly capitalism.
As Matt Stoller has written in his newsletter, Big, “look for mergers in Comcast buying Charter, Exxon merging with Chevron, banks consolidating, and Amazon and Google once again going out and making large acquisitions. “the blatantly illegal LIV Golf-PGA Tour deal is going to move through, as long as Elon Musk is involved somehow.” Others, such as Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, said M&A activity will increase after Trump takes office.
So what are these companies and their billionaire owners or top shareholders whose companies will benefit from the Trump spoils system? Here is the list:
The Oligarch ETF Component Companies
Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS). Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, donated about $200 million to Trump in his presidential bids in 2024 and 2020. Miriam Edelson, a physician, now owns a majority stake in the LVS and the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Adelson wants to convince Trump that Israel should annex the West Bank and Gazza Strip, which it looks like the Israelis have now begun. Adelson’s contributions, along with those of the Republican Jewish Coalition, were very divisive for the American Jewish community, of which about 70% supported Kamala Harris. Trump owes Adelson, and she should be able to get whatever she asks for within her area of expertise, such as an ambassadorship.
World Wrestling Entertainment (“TKO”) donated $16 million to Trump groups, mainly through Linda McMahon (the wife of Vince McMahon). Linda McMahon is a Trump loyalist. Forbes reported that she “has been involved in politics for years, running unsuccessfully for Senate in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012 and then serving as head of the Small Business Administration under Trump. She’s still close to the center of the MAGA orbit, chairing the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policy Institute, serving on the board of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group, and contributing more than $15 million to Trump’s PACs.” If you ever wondered why Trump rallies looked like professional wrestling spectacles, complete with the sideshow of cheap performers, McMahon provided the model for these political carnivals.
Energy Transfer Energy Transfer L.P. (NYSE: E.T.). Kelcy Warren’s company is best known for the highly controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which Trump helped expedite in one of his first acts in office. Warren donated $5.8 million to Trump.
Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE-ICE). Major Trump donors Jeff Sprecher and his wife, former Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, donated about $5 million to Trump. As noted on this site, Sprecher and Loeffler are the most corrupt public couple in public life.
A series of articles on this site explain that Sprecher and his wife, a sitting Senator, were involved in an insider trading scandal as NYSE chairman, but they got away with it because of an outdated SEC rule. The fact that they got away with it must have impressed Trump, who can now do the same thing on a much larger scale.
Even better for Trump, Loeffler was involved in the Georgia vote-stealing scheme that failed to materialize. That alone would prove her loyalty to Trump. As expected, neither Loeffler nor Sprecher were ever prosecuted by the law. This pattern will be much more evident in the new Trump administration.
Loeffler and the other senators accused of insider trading got their get-out-of-jail-free cards because 1) they were Senators, 2) they were both major Republican donors and 3) a controversial rule, Rule 10b5-1, that benefits members in Congress. One of the hallmarks of the American legal system is that there are at least two systems of justice: rich vs. poor, and elected officials vs. average citizens.
According to attorney Patrick Daugherty, senior SEC partner at the Chicago law firm of Foley & Lardner, SEC Rule 10b5-1 says that “if you are a corporate insider, you can enter into a plan that will allow for shares to be sold at stated intervals in dollar amounts, according to an algorithm with the trades done in a certain way. This means the corporate executives take themselves out of timing decisions about when to buy or sell. They give control to an outside advisor or brokerage firm that is not communicating with them.” That is the scheme.
What makes Sprecher’s donations worth watching is that ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange, a designated self-regulatory organization that has to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fact that Sprecher, the NYSE chairman, was connected to an insider trading scheme would be scandalous in another era, but not now. Given the regulatory accountability of ICE, Sprecher’s significant donations to Trump and his anti-regulation policies will make the new head of the SEC a vital post in the deregulation world. Sprecher should directly benefit from lax SEC oversight, including appointing a new, more lenient SEC chairman.
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). Thanks to the $2.7 million in donations to Trump, Robert “Woody” Johnson has a right to ask for some favors. Johnson has already cashed in some favor when Trump appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom. Johnson is also the owner of the New York Jets.
Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCHW). The link to Schwab is J. Joe Ricketts, who donated $2 million to Trump. Rickets sold his brokerage firm to T.D. Ameritrade is now a subsidiary of Charles Schwab. Like Sprecher, Rickets has a direct regulatory relationship with the SEC, and whoever Trump picks to be SEC chairman will undoubtedly know which firms were major Trump donors.
United Rentals, Inc. (NYSE-URI) Don Ahern donated over $1 million to Trump and is a long-time supporter. Ahern, with a net worth of about $1 billion, owns a firm that rents construction equipment.
Wynn Resorts Limited (NASDAQ: WYNN). Steve Wynn donated $1.1 million to Trump and his various groups. As Forbes reported, Wynn’s name is displayed on casinos in Vegas and Macau, but his ex-wife now controls the empire.
The Satellite Investments to the Oligarch ETF
Aside from the Oligarch ETF, some individual sectors and firms will benefit from the Trump right-wing agenda. The Oligarch ETF can be combined with these particular companies or ETFs in defense, crypto, or energy. This can be done via a core-satellite strategy, also known as core and explore, that uses a core portfolio holding (the Oligarch ETF) complemented by satellite positions, often in other mutual funds or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), to meet specific client needs.
Here are individual companies that could be part of a satellite strategy for the Oligarch ETF:
Geo Group (GEO) is a large private prison firm that will benefit from the Trump anti-immigration and incarceration program. GEO is big with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) processing centers and USMS (U.S. Marshals Service) detention centers. Remember, each arrested immigrant is a few dollars in profit for GEO.
Coinbase Global (COIN)
Exxon Mobil (XOM)
Nucor (NUE)
JPMorgan Chase (JPM), a beneficiary of deregulation
Lockheed Martin (LMT)
The Private Equity Mafia Will Profit in Trump World
Private Equity, aka predatory capitalism, will have an outsized role in the Trump administration. Their crucial man inside the Trump family is Musk, who could be named to head a group of outside special billionaire advisors in a think tank to severely reshape and cut the federal government’s budget and workforce numbers.
This will be a technocrat’s dream. Private equity people will use big data, A.I., libertarian philosophy, and a heavy reliance on automation and technology to replace people and programs with the next stage of big tech. They could also use crypto, the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, to make federal payments and thus artificially boost the price of crypto.
As discussed on the site many times, cryptocurrency only has a few purposes:
–To destabilize the Federal Reserve
–To launder money, secretly transfer funds, and pay for gambling debts
–To scam other investors
— To evade paying taxes
Moreover, despite the hype, crypto is neither an asset class nor has any of the classic characteristics of an investable asset (price-driven financials, a dividend history, fair value, a time horizon to hold the investment, transparency).
But these are priorities for traditional investments. In the private equity world, crypto has another, as yet undisclosed purpose, known only to the people who control its origins, price direction, and liquidity. For these mysterious reasons, we expect crypto to be woven into Trump’s future policies.
Since private equity is all about making money by cutting jobs, cutting costs, maintaining secrecy, and paying the most negligible taxes possible, these businesses will seamlessly transition into the Trump business world.
Naturally, they will be investing in companies before the public knows what is happening so they can benefit from their big-brain ideas and make huge profits. Ethics is not a core belief among the private equity crowd, so conflicts of interest, self-serving programs, and making more money will drive this group of outside Trump advisors.
Although the masses cannot invest in private equity firms since they are not qualified investors, they can watch as their government is reduced, jobs are cut, and the private equity firms decimate unions. At the top of the list these people will attack is the US Postal Service. The U.S. Post Office (created in 1775 by Ben Franklin) is America’s largest union. It could be privatized in favor of UPS and Federal Express and regional private mail and package delivery firms that have yet to be created. Also, look for the privatization of airports, public harbor facilities, waterworks, and electric companies.
Although Trump will work with many private equity firms to get their approvals, as well as a share of the profits, here are the leading people in this business who will have the inside track among the private equity firms:
Antonio Gracias, a co-investor and friend of Elon Musk, has donated about $1 million to Trump. As Musk’s protégé and owner of a private equity firm, Gracias is involved with Tesla, SpaceX, X Corp. (formerly Twitter), xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Another private equity baron is Sequoia Capital executive Douglas Leone, who donated $1 million to Trump. Leone is a long-time Trump supporter. He has a net worth of about $8 billion.
Individuals Who Made Big Contributions Will Benefit
The wealthy Republican donors to Trump are the stars of Wall Street. As such, they want to pay less taxes and be free of regulation and anti-trust threats. Importantly, they all want the famed and profitable Carries Interest tax loophole to remain in place or, better yet, be expanded.
This controversial loophole benefits the hedge fund, private equity fund, and real estate businesses, aka the elements of predatory capitalism. The preferential tax treatment of carried interest reduces federal revenues, putting pressure on the federal budget. Carried-interest-loophole graph “The Congressional Budget Office estimated that treating carried interest as ordinary income would raise $12 billion over ten years — including revenues from both individual income taxes and self-employment taxes,” according to the Peter G. Person Foundation.
Howard Lutnick (Cantor Fitzgerald, net worth $1.5 billion); the late Bernie Marcus (Home Depot, co-founder, net worth $8.6 billion); William Albert Ackman (net worth $9.3 billion); Stephen Schwarzman (co-founder of Blackstone, net worth $41 billion); Barry Sternlicht (Starwood Capital, net worth $3.8 billion); Steve Mnuchin (former US Treasury Secretary); David Oliver Sacks, (co-founder of PayPal, net worth $1.7 billion); Larry Ellison (Oracle, net worth $31 billion); Paul Singer (Elliott Investment Management, net worth $6 billion); Leonard Blavatnik (Warner Music Group, net worth $31 billion); and Dr. Miriam Adelson (widow of Sheldon Adelson, with a net worth of $34 billion). Adelson contributed $100 million to Trump’s campaign. Cliff Asness (AQR Capital Management), Paul Singer (Elliott Management), Harvey Golub (former Chairman, American Express Co.), Bruce Kovner (Caxton Alternative Management), Susan Lebovitz-Edelman (Edelman Family Foundation), Jay Lefkowitz (Kirkland & Ellis), Ben Horowitz, a partner in the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; Dan Loeb (Third Point), and Robert Rosenkranz (Delphi Capital Management)
Trump’s Role in the Shady Crypto World
The crypto industry was Trump’s largest corporate donor. In exchange, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world, and we’ll get it done.” The U.S. and federal regulators, especially the SEC, have not been friendly to crypto because it has no financial purpose. While its proponents say it is an “alternative investment,” there is no evidence that it is anything less than a Ponzi scheme. Trump is no stranger to Ponzi schemes; his family has invested in crypto, and Trump himself has issued crypto gimmicks for donations. As a crypto-friendly president, crypto is one more scheme he will push on the naïve American people.
While the crypto industry will try to capitalize on their significant donations, their primary beneficiaries could be Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who donated $1.3 million to Trump. The brothers made their money by getting a $65 million settlement in 2008 from Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Winklevoss brothers claimed they invented an earlier version of Facebook, which Zuckerberg stole from them. The Winklevoss twins invested some settlement proceeds into Bitcoin and other crypto scams and founded the Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.
As part of the shady world of crypto, the brothers were forced “to return at least $1.1 billion to customers of its defunct lending program and pay a fine of $37 million for unsafe and unsound practices as part of a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services.” Since they are heavily involved in crypto, they are in touch with Musk.
