On January 20th, in the so-called Rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington D.C., the inauguration ceremony of the 47th (having already been the 45th) President of the United States, Donald Trump, took place. The event was unique for a number of reasons, including the fact that it did not take place outdoors on the steps of the building itself, as had been the custom for the past 40 years. The public explanations offered to justify such a change ranged from inclement weather (always frequent at that time of year) to the possibility of mass protests marring the celebration.

In any case, the ceremony was a unique event for many other reasons and, among others, there is at least one that was captured in several snapshots by different photographers who pointed their lenses in the same direction. These are possibly the photos that in all of history have symbolically grouped together the most millions of dollars per pixel.

There they were, modestly, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Jeff Bezos, Mr. Zundar Pichai and Mr. Elon Musk in the same row. But if you turned the axis of the shutter release a little, you could also get a picture of Tim Cook.

(From left to right) Apple CEO Tim Cook, Vivek Ramaswamy and National Security Secretary candidate Kristi Noem attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, on January 20, 2025. Photo by Saul Loeb, AFP

(From left to right) Apple CEO Tim Cook, Vivek Ramaswamy and National Security Secretary candidate Kristi Noem attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States at the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. Photo by Saul Loeb, AFP Most of them had traveled in previous days for private conversations at Mar-a-Lago, the reelected president’s private estate in Florida. No public notes of what was discussed there were released.

These guests were placed by the federal protocol service ahead of politicians and personalities who in subsequent days could be ratified or not as members of the new cabinet.

Most of the press covered the event emphasizing the new president’s relations with big capital, suggesting that the executive would be at the service of oligarchs, or mentioning the billionaires’ assault on the highest government posts. But, without denying the above, there was important data that was left out of the story, intentionally or not.

We mention some statistics that can bring us closer to other conclusions.

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of the company Meta, which brings together under its umbrella the three largest information sharing platforms (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) in the United States and much of the world, where more than a billion stories are posted daily. 77% of all Internet users use these platforms. An estimated 3.59 billion people are active on at least one of the three platforms.

In 2024 alone, Facebook (one of them) made a profit of 117 billion dollars, a growth of 36% compared to 2020.

Jeff Bezos currently appears as the former CEO and founder of Amazon, a company that has 310 million regular customers worldwide, but which in 2023 received 2.2 billion visits to its sales platforms. In 2023 alone, Amazon had a turnover of more than $570 billion, which represented a growth of 12% over the previous year.

Bezos’ departure from the management of Amazon has to do with the priority he gives to investments he is currently making in the robotics and artificial intelligence industries such as Swiss-Mile in Europe, Figure AI and Skild AI.

Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Alphabet, a company whose main component is Google, the search engine used by one billion people around the world to perform two trillion searches a year.

Alphabet announced at the beginning of 2025 that it had obtained net profits in the previous year of 100.118 billion dollars, for a growth of 36%, of which 350.018 billion of the same currency were recorded as income, 14% higher than the previous year.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, is best known for his successes and failures at the head of Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which aims to create an international communications network outside the regulatory function of national authorities. His commitment to social networks is perhaps more modest than the previous ones, as his political toy Twitter, renamed X, had only 611 million users at the beginning of 2024, who were concentrated in the international decision-making segments. X’s annual revenue in the last twelve months was only $2.7 billion, with a net profit of $1.25 billion.

Finally, Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, a company that has produced an estimated 2,200 commercial (non-military) communication devices in use worldwide, and is the leader in so-called smartphones and tablets. Its online app store attracts 650 million users per week. In the last quarter of 2024 alone, the company had a sales of $124.3 billion, which brought in $36.3 billion in profits.

On reading this data, any reader would come to the important conclusion that with friends like these, there is no need for the traditional political action committees that have plagued and corrupted American politics for years. The function of these committees was traditionally to collect funds to support the campaigns of candidates for any elected position at any level of government (federal, state, county or city) that would attract votes and ultimately influence the agenda of each politician.

What may escape our attention is the amount of information that such executives and their corporate offspring handle on each and every citizen in the United States who participates in the electoral process (less than 50% are eligible). With that level of data, such digital mechanisms have the potential to influence voter opinion without calling a rally, paying for articles in the press, or putting up posters in neighborhoods.

One can review the bibliography of the last decade that testifies to the number of times that US federal or state legislators concerned about the excessive power of these media have convened hearings in which these businessmen, or their executives, were summoned to testify. In several of them there was lukewarm talk of imposing some kind of regulation on their behavior or business practices, something that has been impossible until now and can practically be ruled out in the future. There are several videos showing prominent senators with a genuflecting and complacent attitude towards these businessmen.

Their companies have already constituted states within a state and between them they have articulated a kind of multilateral system, which operates outside the United Nations and all the organizations that are subordinate to it. In the digital territory they have their own rules, their own population, the economic resources necessary to operate, governance is not elective and the borders are marked only by what each user is capable of defending as their sovereignty. Paradoxically, they appear to be service providers, when in reality they collect and even steal the invaluable personal information provided by their customers.

If these realities were (or are) a danger only to Americans, the problem would be big, but not too big. The internationalization and sophistication of this phenomenon has already posed threats to third parties, who have prepared their defenses in different ways.

On the one hand there are countries like China and Russia that have created their own digital spaces, with strong restrictions on the use of any platform considered invasive. Others have focused their efforts on preparing their citizens to be able to use the services of these networks, but exposing the least amount of personal data that could make them more vulnerable.

In practical terms, the companies mentioned above, and many others not mentioned here, have the capacity to make or break the day of an internet user, to provoke appetites for specific types of consumption, to bring together or drive apart two potential partners or enemies, to make people fear an earthquake that has not yet taken place, to unnecessarily alert hurricane-hunting services, create rejection or support for a public figure who does not even exist, make someone who has healthy parents feel like an orphan. These platforms mobilize and demobilize at will and manage to promote support for far-fetched social programs, or take it away from those who deserve it.

Readers may disagree and consider that the dimensions of the problem are exaggerated. But there is another issue to consider: the military origin of many of these “advances”, and the subordination of these companies to the US armed and security forces, to whom they hand over absolutely all the personal information of their users, without a court order, regulatory mechanism, or other invention that might at least appear to provide some kind of transparency in the process.

It is well known, although not often remembered, that creations such as the internet and GPS originated in military research companies such as DARPA, to be first used by the Pentagon and then “licensed” for use in civilian life.

Over the years, with the creation of these and other devices, the concept of war has changed dramatically, as it is no longer a question of calculating and foreseeing the enemy’s forces and means and their intentions. It is not even a question of avoiding loss of human life with the use of unmanned vehicles, nor of using what we still call the press to create collective states of opinion. It is worth noting here how dramatic the change has been within what was once called the great American press, which has adapted to become the dependent younger brother of these new monstrosities.

Today, the aforementioned companies and their executives have the capacity to access the entire digital dossier of anyone who might become a soldier or simple defender of a rival nation, or simply a non-ally. They can establish communication, reciprocal or otherwise, with that person and even persuade them not to go out to fight, if that is the case. And all this from the solitude of their telephone, their screen, or their online payment system.

Future US governments will have these forces and means at their disposal to “attack” wherever they deem necessary, both within and outside their borders. For the next four years at least, it is unlikely that there will be any government or non-governmental entity capable of regulating their behavior in the interests of the US nation or the world as a whole.

The study of the alliances established abroad by these digital armies could offer us new guidelines for the future relationship between the United States and other countries.

In the photo to which we have alluded, part of the real government of the United States appears, without uniforms or medals, at a time when the ruling class has decided to remove professional politicians, experts or eternal bureaucrats from the executive branch because they consider that they no longer respond to their interests, that it is expensive to pay taxes to finance an inefficient government, or simply to make their interests prevail over the rest of the economic sectors.

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