100 People Who Actually Rule the World

Posted on by Makawiel

This list is a field guide to the 100 oligarchs fighting the Capitalist Civil War — mapped across the four factions tearing the global order apart.

Article by Richard Revelstoke

This is a representative selection — not exhaustive, not a ranking. The Transnational Capitalist Class numbers roughly 3400 billionaires and another difficult to calculate number of members who are politically-connected individuals with billionaire-level clout and influence. The recent Forbes billionaires list claims there are 3428 billionaires with a total wealth increase of 28% from the previous year. Elon Musk leads the list with a net worth of $839 billion, followed by Larry Page ($257 billion), Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), and Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion).

In reality, the politically consequential top tier is closer to 300–500 individuals. The names below are split up to reflect membership in the Four Factions. The factions are evolving and emerging — some members are in more than one faction and others cross the floor.

I have included links to their Wikipedia bios for further exploration.

Davos Faction (Stakeholder Capitalist Globalists)

The financial-managerial wing of the TCC. Their factional identity is institutional integration with the post-1989 multilateral order — asset management (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), central bank networks, climate-finance architecture, multilateral institutions, philanthro-capitalist infrastructure.

Imperial Nationalists

The hard-power faction: military-industrial integration, settler-nationalist political projects, decoupling and tariff hawks, neoconservative networks. Organized around the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Membership defined by political project, not industry or demography.

Silicon Valley (Techno-Sovereigns)

The newest faction. Network State ideology, administrative-state demolition, AI/biotech/aerospace concentration, libertarian-to-reactionary political project. Membership defined by both industry concentration (tech and tech-adjacent capital) and ideological commitment to the techno-sovereign (Techno-Optimist, Network State) project.

State Capitalists

The faction operating through party-state structures rather than individual capital command. Centered on China, with allied state-capitalist projects in Russia, Iran and the Gulf forming an an extended bloc whose BRICS-era political coherence has now visibly failed. The faction’s internal structure is asymmetric — China’s CCP elite is the analytical core; Russia and the Gulf are aligned counterparties whose membership is partial and project-dependent.

China (faction core):

Russia (allied state-capitalist project, increasingly cross-cutting with Imperial Nationalism via war economy):

Gulf state capital (allied, cross-cuts Imperial Nationalism through Israel normalization):

  • Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — Saudi Crown Prince, directs $1.15T PIF; operates across factions — State Capitalist in domestic-developmental mode, Imperial Nationalist on regional security, Davos-courting on global capital deployment
  • Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) — UAE President, directs ADIA (~$1T) and Mubadala
  • Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani — Qatari Emir, directs QIA (~$525B)
  • Yasir Al-Rumayyan — PIF Governor, operational head of Saudi state capital deployment

Overlapping and Hybrid Faction Members

These factions are not all nations with flags. The Imperialists are dominated by the Trump-Netanyahu national coalition and the State Capitalists are dominated by China-CCP, but Davos and Silicon Valley have no national flag or club badge to wear, so they can more easily slide into another faction. Loyalties are fluid.

Several figures in the Davos sample (Schwarzman, Ackman) operate in the Imperial Nationalist overlap. Several figures in the Silicon Valley sample (Ellison, Karp, increasingly Andreessen on Israel-related questions) operate at the Silicon Valley–Imperial Nationalist overlap. Elon Musk has his hands in all the factions, though he is born a Silicon Valley boy.

This cross-cutting pattern is my book’s evidence that the factional civil war is partly a realignment in progress rather than a fixed balance of power.

The Gulf monarchies are the clearest junction zone where all four factions compete for influence. MBS, MBZ, and Tamim each maintain operative relationships with all four factions and align differently depending on the issue: with Davos on global capital deployment and ESG framing, with Imperial Nationalists on Israel normalization and Iran containment, with Silicon Valley on AI infrastructure (HUMAIN, G42), with State Capitalists on Belt and Road and BRICS+. They function as a swing bloc.

Russia under Putin has migrated factionally over the past decade. Pre-2022 Russia operated as a recognizably State Capitalist project with parallels to China. Post-2022, the war economy has restructured Russian capital around military production, oligarch reorganization, and territorial revanchism — a factional drift toward Imperial Nationalism in character, but not joining the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Putin’s “agglutinator” failure on Iran is partly a consequence of this drift: the State Capitalist project requires economic-developmental coherence, and Russia no longer has one.

India under Modi is in active migration from Davos-curious to Imperial Nationalist. The February 2026 Knesset address and the post-Iran-war BRICS defection are the two visible milestones of this migration. The Adani–Ambani capital base is split: Ambani remains Davos-integrated; Adani has migrated toward the Imperial Nationalist alignment via Modi–Trump–Netanyahu coordination.

The State Capitalist faction is the most internally coherent because it operates through party-state discipline rather than individual factional commitment. This is its strength and its limit. The faction cannot recruit transnational class members in the way Davos can; its expansion runs through state-to-state agreements rather than class formation.

Source: https://www.themargins.ca/p/100-people-who-actually-rule-the

Image: AI

Life

Why humanity should declare an International Day Without Artificial Intelligence?
Tech & science

Biotech companies are creating animals without natural reproduction for the first time
Middle East

BRICS silent on US-Israel war against Iran
error: Content is protected !!