One of the most remarkable things about the inauguration Monday was the prominence of place given to tech titans during the ceremonies.

Magnates worth more than $1 trillion were seated right behind the president and a row ahead of Donald Trump’s Cabinet as Trump was sworn in. Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai were all in the Capitol Rotunda, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang sat in the overflow room.

What does this high proximity mean for the second Trump administration? It means suddenly the titans who decide how Americans shop, what they drive, how they organize their world, how people talk to each other and which voices are heard or not heard have even more power to influence how the country is run, not to mention to protect their own fiefdoms.

It means the nation’s biggest tycoons are fast becoming oligarchs, according to an expert in oligarchy.

“What makes tycoons into oligarchs is the connection to the system of power,” said Pulitzer Prize winner David Hoffman, author of “The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.”

“Just being a billionaire is one thing; being a billionaire with influence over government and policy and using that influence to gain more wealth and power is being an oligarch — oligarchy means ‘rule of the few.’ We are closer to one today than we have been in more than a century.”

Business leaders have long had a cozy relationship with presidents and Washington power brokers in this country, Democrat and Republican alike. The business of America has always been business. But the concentration of powerful titans we saw Monday, and the unfettered access Trump is giving them to the levers of power, especially Musk, may be unprecedented.

A couple of cases in point.

Musk spent more than $250 million to elect Trump, thanks to the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates of unrestricted “dark money” into the political system a few years back. After his gift, Musk was appointed to oversee a giant government efficiency program, but he is not serving in any official government role. He’s a quasigovernmental agency of one.

“This can warp our democracy and creates a center of power that is beyond all accountability,” Hoffman points out.

Another example: In Congress, 352 of 435 representatives and 79 of 100 senators agreed that TikTok was a security risk because the app shares personal information with the Chinese government. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, 9-0. Trump led the effort to ban TikTok during his first term, but changed his mind after he met last year with billionaire Jeff Yass, a major conservative donor with financial ties to ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company. On Monday, Trump delayed the ban.

That’s a decision made to please an oligarch, and position Trump optically as the man who saved TikTok for millions of TikTok users. It’s not a decision made for the good of the people.

The inauguration marks a dramatic shift in the tech industry’s relationship to Trump. Four years ago, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook suspended Trump for violating its policies in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The companies also frequently removed content from Trump’s supporters. Bezos warned aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges,” and took much fire during Trump’s first term for the aggressive watchdogging by the paper he owns, The Washington Post.

This year, Zuckerberg has done away with the Facebook fact-checkers who so irritated Trump with what he called censorship of his posts, and Bezos donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

They are counting on Trump to overturn many of President Joe Biden’s restrictions on social media companies, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, among other things.

This isn’t what voters voted for, I would argue. They voted for Trump’s promise to crack down on illegal immigration and for his populist promise to bring down the cost of living. They didn’t vote for Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg. They didn’t vote for the creation of an oligarchy.

There’s also a revenge-of-the-guys aspect to the tech titans’ embrace of Trump and vice versa. Zuckerberg made waves after saying on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the tech industry has been sapped of “masculine energy” and needs to bring that “aggression” back.

And Sigal Samuel of Vox put an interesting twist on the motivations of this gang of tech oligarchs recently. “For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology — an ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

“They want absolutely zero limits on their power,” Samuel wrote. “Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.”

More than anything, these tech titans have one priority: themselves and increasing their wealth. The public good is not their priority. They want more of the power to control the economy in their own hands, not in the hands of an unpredictable bunch of elected representatives of the people. They see Trump as the deliverer of that power.

What all this points to is an administration where all power is personalized, where political connections and person-to-person interactions may drive decision-making in the next four years more than consensus priorities like increasing jobs or making housing more affordable.

Hoffman, for one, sees warning signs. His book about the Russian oligarchs shows what can happen when a budding market economy is warped by a handful of very powerful titans if the rules are not strong enough to prevent “bandit capitalism.” The resulting war among Russia’s oligarchs, President Boris Yeltsin and Russian reformers crippled Russia’s nascent conversion to capitalism and paved the way for Vladimir Putin to reassert autocratic control.

“Our greatest threat came from the people with big money, who gobbled each other up and thus toppled the political edifice we had built with such difficulty,” Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs.

Hoffman worries about the wreckage that might happen in the United States if our country’s carefully balanced, multiple centers of power are consolidated rather than continue to keep each other in check. What happens if the level playing field created by robust economic competition is unleveled? What happens if the free market is no longer truly free?

“I think it is important and admirable to have tycoons in capitalism,” Hoffman said to me. “I think our entrepreneurs are the envy of the world. But they should not be sitting unaccountable in the councils of government, deciding what programs live or die, or what contracts get millions. These are huge potential conflicts of interest.”

The concern is not with wealth, “it is with the merger of wealth and power.”