Billionaire wealth and power is being turbocharged under the current Trump administration. Over the past year alone, the top ten U.S. billionaires saw their wealth grow by an astounding $698 billion, enough to end homelessness in the U.S. for over sixty years or end world hunger for twenty years. As working people across the nation face rising prices and costs for basic needs and see their state and local budgets slashed, billionaires are using their ever-expanding wealth to buy superyachts, travel to outer space, and — unfortunately for the rest of us — try and live forever.
Moreover, within this wider expansion of billionaire power and wealth, a subset of the billionaire class, tied especially to tech and finance, has closely aligned itself with Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Megabillionaires from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Jeff Yass and Larry Ellison are financing, enabling and profiting from Trump’s rule and its attacks on workers, immigrants, climate, and more.
It’s no stretch to say that, today, billionaire influence and political authoritarianism are conjoined and mutually reinforcing, allies in a joint effort to enrich and consolidate the power of an oligarchic elite.
But the good news is that people across the country are resisting this billionaire takeover.
At LittleSis, we’ve heard from organizers across the country – from campaigns like Tesla Takedown and Purge Palantir, from Pennsylvania to Washington – who want to take on billionaire power where they live. They want to learn about their own local billionaires: who they are, where their power and influence lies, and how to resist their agenda while putting forward one of our own.
Across the U.S., we’re already seeing a growing fightback against the power of billionaire oligarchs. For example:
- Starting in early 2025, thousands of people across the U.S. came together in “Tesla Takedown” actions that gathered at Tesla dealerships to protest Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s key role in Trump’s assault on government agencies and workers through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Tesla Takedown succeeded in toxifying the Tesla brand to such an extent that the company’s car sales dramatically fell. Musk, the world’s richest person, stepped down as head of DOGE in late May 2025.
- Organizers in Pennsylvania have forged a broad coalition to take on Jeff Yass, the libertarian founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group who is the state’s wealthiest billionaire and a key funder of conservative causes. In 2024 the coalition took hundreds of people to Harrisburg to ask their elected officials on both sides of the aisle to — among other things — vote against a Yass-backed voucher bill that would reallocate critical funds away from Pennsylvania’s public schools. The campaign was successful in stopping that bill and has since made Yass and billionaire influence a key issue in elections from local races to the recent state Supreme Court election.
- Over 200 groups in New York formed the Invest in Our New York coalition to make the state’s wealthiest people and corporations pay their fair share to fund public goods like education, affordable housing and healthcare. In 2021, they won a big victory when New York State passed a budget that included $4.3 billion in revenue from raising taxes on the wealthiest people and corporations to fund things like emergency rental assistance, funding for schools, and more. In 2025 the coalition is seeking a billionaire wealth tax and other new taxes on the state’s wealthiest people and corporations.
- Through the “Purge Palantir” campaign, people across the U.S. have protested Palantir Technologies, the data management corporation headed by billionaires Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Thiel has been an influential behind-the-scenes player in the Trump administration while Palantir received more than $322 million in government contracts during the first half of 2025 alone. Palantir’s tech provides the backbone for ICE’s data management and integration system that drives the agency’s surveillance, raids, detention and deportation of immigrants.
- As tech billionaires like Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others look to build data centers to power the rising AI bubble, local communities from Virginia and Arizona and Georgia to Michigan, have been taking on these billionaires and tech executives. Oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers that are gobbling up electricity and contributing to rising utility costs for working people, while often being powered by dirty methane gas fossil fuels.
At LittleSis, we have received requests from organizers across the country who are looking to map billionaire influence in their cities, towns, and states in order to fight back. This guide includes questions, resources, and examples to help you map billionaire influence and opportunities to fight back where you live.
Thanks to Gabriela Noa Betancourt from Action Center on Race and the Economy and to Maggie Corser for their additions and feedback on this guide.