For some weird reason they get called "elites" if they're American, but oligarchs if only if they're Russian, even though they're the same class of wildly disproportionately powerful people.
the richest people in russia got that way by plundering the country of its natural resources and the remnants of the soviet-era industry.
those are not the same.
To be honest, the poster child for American businesses are Intuit, Equifax, that company that manufactures EpiPens, or the company that manufactures insulin etc. They all essentially exist by rent-seeking without creating value, enforced through lobbying or regulatory capture.
Painting American companies and Russian companies in such stark contrast is overly simplistic. And pretending American elites are any more altruistic than Russian elites would be insanity.
Wouldn't it be some combination of JPMorgan, Google, Boeing, Berkshire Hathaway, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Cardinal Health or something (you can mix in whatever Fortune 500 companies you want)?
The rent-seeking companies appear to me to be a far smaller portion of the economy than others that inarguably produce economic value.
Random exceptions don't invalidate the point of the parent comment.
You can try to make an argument that EV tax credits are bad and should be abolished, but the two situations just aren't even in the same universe.
> the richest people in russia got that way by plundering the country of its natural resources and the remnants of the soviet-era industry. > those are not the same.
Importantly, the wealth of the richest in the oligarchy is maintained (or destroyed like in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) by the use of force by the authoritarian. The power of the authoritarian is in turn backstopped financially by the oligarchs.
The wealth of the richest in the US is maintained by the economic system and its associated laws (however flawed). There is a conceivable path to make the system fairer in the US via elections, but not in Russia.
This may have been the case through the 1960s but post 1970s American is very much back on the crypto-aristocrat track with people inheriting vast wealth or being given jobs as money managers or financiers due to family influence and then rent-seeking the hell out of anything that smells like money.
It really is a wide difference in degree.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-qui...
Oligarchs don't have power outside the authoritarian apparatus of the state. Oligarchs exist entirely at the pleasure of the leader and have no true autonomy. If an Oligarch tries to 'branch out', they end up in jail or dead.