Meet the Broligarchs!
The Gen Xers who won the latest round of Monopoly
At the U.S. President’s inauguration in the beginning of 2025, a group of smartly dressed middle-agers made their debut.
The country was introduced to the broligarchs, insanely wealthy men at the tippity-tippity-top of the economic pyramid, who had all been quick to bend the knee to the overlord of the new regime.
The moniker “broligarch” implies that these oligarchs are kinda cool, maybe, but also kinda douchebags? It’s an amusing term, and a fitting one considering that these guys are mostly from my generation, Generation X. We’re the generation that was criticized in our youth for being crass and ignorant1, and is now mocked in our middle-age for being insignifcant and easily forgotten.
If you doubt me, I made a short list of the broligarchs, defined as the tech oligarchs who either attended/helped bankroll the inauguration in 2025, and/or were part of the DOGE process of ransacking the Federal government immediately afterward. As you can see, they are indeed almost all Gen Xers, with that one android-like Millennial guy standing out as an exception, as he does in the picture above.
BOOMER
Tim Cook (b. 1960)<-on the cusp!GENERATION X
Jeff Bezos (b. 1964)
Peter Thiel (b. 1967)
Elon Musk (b. 1971)
Marc Andreessen (b. 1971)
Sundar Pichai (b. 1972)MILLENNIAL
Mark Zuckerburg (b. 1984)<-wannabe; he tries so hard to be cool!
My generation, growing up, embraced a market-oriented, transactional approach to life, focused on making money and having fun. Our best and most successful leaders emerged either in business or in entertainment (I mean, just look at how piss-poor our leaders in government are).
The broligarchs are those of us Gen Xers who came to dominate the tech industry. A tiny elite that are the ultimate winners of the digital revolution, with its profound transformation of media and the marketplace in our lifetimes.2
This revolution unfolded during our youth, back when the Internet was more free-wheeling and chaotic, more of a place for individual expression. As Generation X aged into mid-life, the Internet matured and the key market players in the new forms of information consumption consolidated their power and control. This was only natural, as consumers value the convenience and reliability that comes from big, successful brands.
So now we’re in the “Big Tech” era, and we’re all familiar with the technology giants that dominate our digital lives. Apple. Google. Meta. Amazon. The companies that are run by the Gen X broligarchs.
This is hardly an unexpected pattern. Previous infotech revolutions have featured disruptive new technologies that shake up existing modes of communication, are developed in a fiercely competitive marketplace of conflicting standards, and then congeal into monopolies of one or a few dominant corporations.3 It happened with the telegraph, which was a chaotic mess as inititally developed, and eventually came to be controlled by Western Union. It happened with radio and television, which for a good while were dominated in the United States by the “Big Three” networks.
It’s happened again with the Internet.
Now that the broligarchy is in control, they are ready to transform the civic order in accord with their techno-utopian fantasies.
Marc Andreessen (not at the inauguration, but involved with DOGE) has a manifesto that spells it out. This is an excerpt that I found here on substack:
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness. Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
-from Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto
It’s so very Gen X to oppose credentialism and expertise. We are the DIY generation, that believes that any savvy person can figure things out for themselves. That is, after all, what we had to do growing up as neglected kids. You might say we’re the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It’s also very Gen X for the ultimate winners of the previous competitive age to now impose their will with an all-or-nothing authoritarianism. And under the banner of a stupidly named pseudo-government agency, no less. Suck it up, snowflakes!
The ruthlessness of what DOGE did was shocking, but hardly suprising. It looks exactly like what the broligarch in charge did when he took over a major social media company, as this substack post points out.
The broligarchy lining up before the MAGA boss suggests a marriage of the new regime and the digital revolution, the end game that began with Elon Musk’s maneuvering to take over Twitter. Fascism on the digital march. In lockstep, The Washington Post, owned by broligarch Jeff Bezos, is currently beating the drum for Trump’s Iran War.
It embarasses me that my generation’s preeminent members are acting this way, but it doesn’t surprise me. Gen Xers aren’t principled moralists; they are nimble opportunitsts, and the broligarchs nimbly obeyed in advance as soon as they saw the MAGA writing on the wall.
It’s all about the bottom line with these guys.
One lambasting of rising Gen Xers in the 1980s accused us of having dull, lazy minds and lacking critical thinking skills: Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. United States: Simon & Schuster, 1987 (ISBN 9780671479909).
Generational theorists William Strauss and Nile Howe predicted that Gen X would sort themselves into winners and losers as we aged, a natural consquence of living as atomized, individualistic “particle men” (to quote They Might Be Giants). Their Gen X-focused book is a good read for insight into who we were as young adults: Howe, Neil., Strauss, William. 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?. United States: Vintage Books, 1993 (ISBN 9780679743651).
Why “13th Gen”? That’s what they called us then; the term “Generation X” was only just beginning to catch on in the early 1990s.
Two different scholars have documented these cycles, though I am not aware that they have ever collaborated. See:
Spar, Debora L.. Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet. United States: Harcourt, 2001 (ISBN 9780156027021).
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010 (ISBN 9780307594655).
'The Gen Xers who won the latest round of Monopoly' - bon mot envy alert.
I saw an Andressonn clip, i think a recent one, and he's telling the softball pitcher how psychiatry, a 'Vienna thing,' (geez, fella. just say the J-word already) seeks to emasculate the Great Lords by filling them with guilt.
1) How dare he go Mary fucking Marsh?
2) He would almost certainly have been ded by 30 if his puerile fantasy materialized
3) The sheer, unsullied ignorance of the man. He's like a small child with the Dunning-Kruger score of a college sophomore, majoring in PHIL.
4) He seriously looks about to explode. I've never SEEN a man more in need of therapy.
5) Do you remember how many times ol' Niccolo reminded the Duke's idiot son, in statecraft for the mentally challenged, I mean 'The Prince?' I lost track at seven:
Paraphrasing: "Don't surround yourself with sycophants, imbecile!'