US President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania arrive for a New Year’s Eve event at Mar-o-Lago on December 31, 2024. Photo / Eric Lee, New York Times
Billionaires and multimillionaires are flocking to a city where power has been more important than money, but is now deeply intertwined with it.
US President Joe Biden warned in his farewell address to the nation last week that an oligarchy is taking shape in America. In Washington DC, the oligarchs are already here, buying big houses.
Counting President-elect Donald Trump himself, there are at least a dozen billionaires among his Cabinet picks and those headed for senior roles in the new administration. Elon Musk tops the list with a US$429 billion ($768b) net worth, according to Forbes, making him the world’s richest man. Trump weighs in with an estimated US$6.8b.
It is an extraordinary concentration of wealth in a city where power has always been more important than money, but is now more than ever intertwined with it. Trump campaigned as a populist defender of the American working class, but he has put some of his richest donors in commanding roles in the top reaches of Government. A number will oversee the very industries that produced their fortunes.
“It’s tempting to liken this to the Gilded Age, but John D. Rockefeller didn’t actually run McKinley’s campaign or move into the White House,” said Michael Waldman, who was President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter and is now president and chief executive of the Brennan Centre for Justice, which promotes legal system reforms and works to curb money in politics.
He was referring to Musk, who spent more than US$250 million to help Trump win and is now expected to have an office in the White House complex.
One of the most immediate effects in Washington has been an explosion in the luxury real estate market.
Financier Howard Lutnick, Trump’s choice to be Commerce Secretary (worth US$1.5b, according to Forbes), last month closed on the French Chateau-style home of Fox anchor Bret Baier on Foxhall Rd for US$25m, a record for the area. Scott Bessent, the nominee for Treasury Secretary (his financial disclosure statement shows he is worth in excess of US$700m), has looked at a US$7m Federal-style house 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 US$10.5m. Real estate agents would not disclose the buyer, but they did say they were running short of trophy houses in Washington because of a second-term Trump bump.
“We’ve really been overwhelmed by the wealth factor that has come to Washington since the election,” said Jim Bell, an executive vice-president of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. He said agents have resorted to calling their Washington clients and asking if they’d be interested in selling to the newcomers.
Journalist and author Sally Quinn got one such call from an agent who told her she could get twice the price for the 18-room, 1790s Georgetown home she shared for more than 30 years with her husband, the late Benjamin C. Bradlee, the famed executive editor of The Washington Post. The house was once owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son.
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 are local media reports that he is trying to buy the Line Hotel in the buzzy, bar-heavy neighbourhood of Adams Morgan and turn it into a private club. Spokespeople for Musk, the Tesla founder whose rocket company SpaceX 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 the co-leader of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. His partner in the effort is Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a net worth of US$1b, according to Forbes, who is also planning to run for Governor of Ohio, a seat that becomes open in 2026.
Jonathan Taylor, a founder and managing partner of TTR Sotheby’s, said the rich with connections to the administration, although not necessarily a part of it, are moving here too. “There are a lot of very wealthy people looking for a seat at the table,” he said.
That is hardly surprising, said David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the private-equity Carlyle Group.
Big donors, Rubenstein said, “would like to get the policies they believe in from the federal Government – more oil drilling, easier antitrust policy, more favourable crypto policy, less bank oversight. They also want more support for helping American companies invest overseas, and have ready access to government officials”.
Washington housing, he said, was also a relative bargain for them. “If you want to buy a home in New York or Southampton, a really good house, it could cost [US]$100 million to $150 million,” he said. “You can’t spend $25 million in Washington even if you try.”
Rubenstein, who served as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, said he looked at 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 compound in Nantucket, Massachusetts, that Biden has used for his family Thanksgiving vacations.
Democrats have money too, although Biden’s Cabinet was largely filled with single- and double-digit millionaires. His White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zeints, listed assets ranging from US$68m to US$338m on his 2024 financial disclosure form. One outlier was Penny Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune who was a commerce secretary for President Barack Obama and served as Biden’s special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery. She has a current net worth of US$4.1b, according to Forbes.
Trump’s billionaires have substantially bigger assets than those top officials who came to Washington for his first term, which was considered the wealthiest administration in American history at the time. Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex W. Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, had assets of between US$289m and US$350m in 2017. He lasted a little more than a year before Trump fired him by tweet.
Some tech billionaires, who moved here in part to have access to the White House and Congress as their industry came under growing government scrutiny, have been in Washington for years.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post, paid US$23m in 2016 for the former Textile Museum on a grand street in the Kalorama neighbourhood. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a New Zealand citizen, who donated more than US$1m to Trump in 2016, paid US$13m in 2021 for a home on Woodland Drive owned by Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce in Trump’s first term. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, paid US$15m for the home across from Quinn on N Street, where Jacqueline Kennedy lived for a short time after her husband’s assassination in 1963.
“These are really rich people,” said Kara Swisher, a journalist who chronicles the tech industry and is a former opinion writer for the New York Times. “As much as they like to have an image of not being spendy, they’re all really spendy. They all have private planes, they all have assistants, they have people who get them the kind of nuts they want.”
Washington neighbourhoods in high demand, real estate agents said, were Kalorama, Massachusetts Avenue Heights off the embassy-lined street of the same name, and Georgetown, whose cobblestone lanes were traditionally the preserve of Washington’s old-line elite. Not anymore, said Jamie Peva, a real estate agent with Washington Fine Properties who has sold houses in Georgetown for 33 years.
“That whole Wasp hegemony that started to decline in the ′80s just continued to decline,” he said. “All of a sudden tech starts to come in. It’s a meritocracy.”
A few of the billionaires will presumably not need homes in Washington. Charles Kushner, a real estate executive whose companies are worth US$2.9b, according to Forbes, is to live in Paris as the US ambassador to France. Trump pardoned Kushner, a major donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign, in the last days of his first term. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion, retaliating against a federal witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission.
Warren Stephens, an investment banker worth US$3.3b, according to Forbes, is to live in London as the US ambassador to Britain. In 2016, Stephens gave US$2m to a group aiming to stop Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination and in the 2024 primaries backed Republican candidates other than Trump. In April, after it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee, Stephens donated more than US$3m to his campaign.
Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets and a long-time Republican donor who is worth US$10.2b, according to Forbes, is set to live in Rome as the US ambassador to Italy.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Elisabeth Bumiller
Photographs by: Doug Mills; Anna Moneymaker; Hiroko Masuike; Eric Lee
©2025 NEW YORK TIMES
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