‘It threatens our entire democracy’: Biden takes aim at tech oligarchs like Musk in farewell speech

president Joe Biden He used his final address to the American people to attack the oligarchy, paying particular attention to tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

In a farewell speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Biden warned that the “dangerous concentration of power” among the wealthy in the United States “threatens our entire democracy.”

“There will be serious consequences if they leave their abuse of power unchecked,” Biden said. “An oligarchy is forming in America of extreme wealth, power and influence…and we are seeing the consequences all across America and we have seen it before.”

Biden returned to the era of trust-busting and expressed hope that future administrations would resume his fight against monopolies.

“The American people stood up to the robber barons of that time,” he said. “They didn’t punish the rich, they just did it [them] Playing by the rules everyone has to follow…it’s helped put us on the right path to building a larger middle class [and] “The most prosperous century any country in the world has ever seen.”

Later in his speech, Biden focused on Silicon Valley. Speaking shortly after Meta announced the end of the fact-checking process and just days before Musk was set to hear from a sitting president, Biden expressed concern about the “concentration of technology, power and wealth” in the “tech-industrial complex.”

“Americans are buried under a torrent of misinformation and disinformation that allows for the abuse of power,” Biden said before raising his voice and pointing toward the camera. “The free press is collapsing, and editors are disappearing.” “Social media is abandoning fact-checking. The truth is stifled by lies, told for power and for profit.”

Elsewhere in the speech, Biden addressed corruption in the halls of power. He called for limiting the term of Supreme Court justices to 18 years, imposing a ban on stock trading among members of Congress, and reforming the tax code that targets the wealthy. Before concluding his speech with an idyllic vision of the United States and its supposed integrity, Biden took a direct shot at that Donald Trump.

“We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president is immune from crimes he commits while in office,” he said. He added: “The president’s power is not unlimited, nor is it invulnerable, nor should it be.”

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