Francis Fukuyama made one of the most celebrated predictions in modern political science. In 1989, he declared that history had ended. Liberal democracy had triumphed. The great ideological struggles were finished. Western civilization, he told the world, had reached its final form. Then came 9/11. Then came jihadism, the rise of China, Putin’s Russia, Brexit, Trump, and AI. History had barely begun. The triumph of liberal democracy wasn’t permanent, but provisional. One chapter, not the epilogue.
Now, Fukuyama is back with another sweeping prophecy. Or rather, a pair of them. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, he claims, threaten American democracy. Their fortunes, he warns, herald a “coming plutocracy” that will topple government. The author of grand finales is writing a new one. And again, he’s spectacularly wrong.
Start with his premise. Fukuyama paints Musk’s possible trillion-dollar payout as an unprecedented concentration of power. But America has always produced titans whose influence made today’s billionaires look almost tame. John D. Rockefeller once controlled nearly two percent of the nation’s economy outright. Andrew Carnegie could’ve personally underwritten the federal budget for months. Henry Ford didn’t just manufacture cars. He reengineered how Americans lived, worked, and even thought about time.
These men commanded power Musk and Ellison can only dream of. Rockefeller didn’t just dominate an industry; he controlled energy itself, owning nearly every gallon of oil that lit and fueled America. Carnegie’s steel empire supplied the rails that spanned the continent, the bridges that connected its cities, and the skyscrapers that reshaped its skyline. They bribed politicians in broad daylight, bought senators like stock shares, and sent Pinkertons with rifles to crush striking workers. That was raw, unrestrained power. By comparison, Tesla looks like a boutique carmaker. SpaceX, for all its rockets, is a mid-sized contractor next to Carnegie’s furnaces. Even at the height of the monopolies, democracy endured. It bent but never broke. Out of their excess came the Progressive Era: antitrust laws, labor protections, and direct elections. Reforms that tempered capitalism without destroying the republic.
That’s Fukuyama’s first mistake. He paints democracy as glass, one careless touch from a billionaire away from breaking. The second mistake is misunderstanding the kind of influence they exercise. The old plutocrats sought political dominance outright. They captured legislatures and turned government into a weapon against competitors. Musk and Ellison have clout, but it’s different. They don’t own the levers of state; they operate within them. Musk didn’t corner oil, steel, or railroads. He built companies by cracking engineering problems others couldn’t. Tesla rose not because Washington banned gas cars but because consumers wanted what he built. SpaceX didn’t topple Boeing through backroom deals; it earned contracts by launching rockets more reliably and cheaply. Influence, yes. Command over the republic, no.
And unlike monopolists of the past, Musk is disciplined daily by the market. Every swing of Tesla’s stock reflects millions of consumers and investors voting. A clumsy tweet can shave billions off his net worth. A failed launch can crush credibility overnight. Rockefeller never had to explain himself to millions of small investors with phones in their pockets. Musk does.
Ellison’s media ventures sound more troubling, and Fukuyama seizes on them and draws a line to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian tycoon who turned media control into political dominance. But that comparison belongs to a different age. Berlusconi operated in a country where Italians had only a handful of television channels, most of them his. That near-monopoly gave him extraordinary leverage. America in 2025 is nothing like Italy in the 1990s. News here comes from YouTube, TikTok, Substack, podcasts, and independent blogs. Narrative control has splintered beyond the reach of any single magnate. Even if Ellison owned every major newspaper in the country, he couldn’t stop alternative voices from breaking stories, going viral, and shaping discourse. The internet shattered the propaganda model Fukuyama still imagines.
Beneath the analysis lies Fukuyama’s own bias. Intellectual power isn’t the same as market power. Professors and bureaucrats gain influence through institutions, credentials, and connections. Entrepreneurs gain it by risking everything and delivering results. That’s why so many academics distrust Musk. He bypasses the gatekeepers. A single Musk post reaches more people in seconds than the vast majority of professors reach in a lifetime. What unnerves Fukuyama isn’t the death of democracy. It’s the decline of the gatekeeping caste of critics and commentators.
America has real problems: polarization, lack of trust in institutions, cultural fragmentation, coffee priced like contraband. But entrepreneurs building cars, rockets, and databases aren’t the cause of the disease. They are symptoms of a dynamic, sometimes unruly economy that still rewards risk and punishes failure. And unlike the mandarins of academia, they’re answerable to markets, to competition, and to customers.
Fukuyama told us history had ended. He was wrong. Now he tells us that a few billionaires are decimating democracy. He’s wrong again. Democracy adapts. It disciplines power through markets as well as ballots. It renews itself because it’s built to absorb shocks.