The Battle of Billionaires: Politics, Power, and the Rise of Post-Democratic Textures

06.06.2025

By Valikhan Tuleshov

Friends, by now you're well aware of the escalating conflicts between America’s most powerful figures. You may be wondering: What comes next? How will this turbulent period end?

There’s a deeper layer to this unfolding drama — one that many overlook. It’s not just a political crisis or ideological standoff. It’s a transformation of the very structure of power. When billionaires dominate the political sphere, the state ceases to be an instrument of public representation and becomes an arena of corporate rivalry. The struggle is no longer about ideology but about control — over tax codes, subsidies, regulations, contracts, technology, and access to geopolitics.

In this post-liberal era, the architecture of power is shifting. Institutions that once mediated authority are weakening. State power is increasingly ceded to transnational business actors who are competing over the core infrastructure of the future — artificial intelligence, space exploration, energy systems, and financial networks. Within the United States, we see a growing trend of political actors defying court rulings, Congress being subordinated to the executive branch, and intra-party fractures intensifying. The very foundations of constitutional democracy are being tested.

Consider Elon Musk’s ability to mobilize Republican factions against Donald Trump. This isn’t just a power play; it reveals the erosion of the traditional party hierarchy. Political parties, once the guardians of democratic continuity, are devolving into digital followings clustered around charismatic individuals. These are no longer institutions of governance, but platforms for techno-ideological influence.

When Treasury Secretary Bessent goes head-to-head with Musk over a “promised trillion,” we are witnessing more than a budgetary dispute. It's a metaphor for institutional collapse. If trillions are distributed not through legal and procedural channels, but through elite confrontation and influence games, then the system of governance itself is in disrepair. What replaces bureaucratic order is a new form of elite competition — informal, performative, and deeply personal.

Musk’s figurative black eye from the Treasury Secretary, or Witkoff’s standoff with Trump and Putin, may seem like exaggerations. But they are symbolic of a deeper reality in which image has eclipsed substance. Politics has transformed into a theater of media events, where power is measured not by legislative accomplishments but by likes, virality, and narrative dominance. The United States is no longer merely a democracy under stress; it has become a post-democratic stage where every conflict doubles as performance.

And when the principal political figures are businessmen — not elected representatives — the state can no longer be considered a vessel of civil will. It becomes, instead, the battleground of oligarchic interests. This marks the emergence of a new political condition: post-democratic oligarchy. In this system, the public is reduced to a passive audience while real decisions are made offstage, in private meetings between those who control money, media, and infrastructure.

This diagnosis leads into my theory of Texturalism. In the post-global world, linear narratives — such as progress, democratic consolidation, or institutional stability — no longer explain our reality. Instead, the world is composed of overlapping and interwoven textures: political, economic, media, and civilizational. The current conflicts are not merely struggles for power, but collisions between these distinct textures.

The political texture includes the traditional apparatus of government, laws, and parties. The economic texture governs capital, technological innovation, and financial flows. The media texture defines how events are perceived, framed, and remembered. And the civilizational texture contains our collective desires, anxieties, and visions of the future.

The crisis we are living through is not simply a crisis of democracy — it is a crisis of synchronicity between these textures. Their rhythms, logics, and priorities are no longer aligned. Musk, Trump, Bessent, and Witkoff are not just individuals; they are personifications of living textures. Musk is the technocratic future, conjured through innovation and invention. Trump represents populist power, rooted in identity and historical sentiment. Bessent embodies financial control — mastery of flows and value. Witkoff represents geopolitical architecture — the manipulation of land, space, and symbolic capital.

Each of them creates new narratives, new rituals, new power structures. Through the lens of Texturalism, this is a shift from vertical subjectivity — where the citizen relates to a centralized state — to heterotextual subjectivity, where power belongs to those who can weave new realities across multiple textures. What we’re witnessing is not a crisis within the system, but a shift away from the very idea of centralized institutional authority.

In this framework, the state is no longer the sovereign center, but merely one actor among many. It is one texture within a larger, fluid structure in which corporations, platforms, and charismatic networks now play dominant roles. Some may view this fragmentation as the onset of chaos. But from a Texturalist perspective, chaos is not destructive — it is generative. It contains the potential energy of new configurations, new patterns, new realities.

The battle among billionaires is not a grotesque distraction; it is the new form of political engagement. It signals the transition from rigid institutionality to flexible, overlapping systems of influence. Whether this leads to catastrophe or reinvention depends on how we respond — not by reverting to the past, but by modeling new forms of synchronous textures that can create stability without hierarchy.

Will Musk, Trump, Bessent, and Witkoff ever reconcile? Perhaps, but only temporarily — and only in response to shared threats, such as a rising China or the narrative dominance of AI platforms like OpenAI. Any alliance would be a strategic overlap, not a lasting peace. Their competition is intrinsic, defined by incompatible visions of the future and overlapping zones of influence.

From the perspective of Texturalism, conflict is not a failure — it is a mode of coexistence. Peace, in the classical sense, is impossible. What is possible is symphonic divergence — a state in which different textures develop in parallel, exchanging tools, ideas, and symbols, without dissolving into one another.

Musk continues to build toward Mars and digital superintelligence. Trump reignites MAGA and reshapes identity politics. Bessent architects a new financial infrastructure. Witkoff crafts geopolitical reality in places like the UAE or Israel. They share a meta-reality, but not a unified vision. This is no longer a singular world — it is a composition of multiplicities.

So no — they will not make peace. They will intertwine.

In this new era of deconstruction, where the old logic of centralized power collapses, a different form of co-existence is emerging. It’s not about unity or consensus. It’s about the choreography of divergence — a world where politicians, corporations, technologies, and mythologies do not govern, but compose.

And in this composition, we must learn not to return to the center — but to navigate the textures.