Fiona Hill Explains Trump, Musk and Why They Both Talk to Putin

When it comes to Elon Musk, he’s promoting Donald Trump’s candidacy and transacting with Vladimir Putin because it serves his own interests in amassing political and financial power, writes Fiona Hill.

The news of the past few weeks has included some developments that on their own could seem minor: Since he left office, Donald Trump has held a half-dozen phone calls with Vladimir Putin. Elon Musk is also talking regularly to the Russian leader. A couple of newspaper owners decided their newspapers’ editorial boards shouldn’t make an endorsement in the presidential election.

But for Fiona Hill, the former Trump adviser who is one of the world’s top experts on Russia and Putin, these events create a worrisome pattern.

In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Hill, like other scholars and historians with an expertise in autocratic regimes, said she sees the American political system already drifting into autocracy, even before Trump is potentially elected. A key sign is that members of the country’s billionaire class are acting more and more like oligarchs.

Thinking about Trump and Putin and Musk as fellow oligarchs helps explain why they all seem so enthralled with each other. As Hill noted, they are part of a very small group of men who control vast fortunes and vast political power that have global reach, and who prefer to deal with each other.

“They aren’t driven by the people they represent or the companies that they represent, but by the peer group that they are in, which is an extraordinarily small group of people,” Hill told me. “Their interactions are all about them figuring out how to exercise power together.”

When it comes to Musk, he’s promoting Trump’s candidacy and transacting with Putin because it serves his own interests in amassing political and financial power, Hill said: “His loyalty is not necessarily to the United States.”

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve learned that Vladimir Putin has been in regular contact with both former President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. Let’s start with Trump. What do you think is going on here?

President Trump always wants to stress that he has a great relationship with Putin. He’s also been very quick to say that talking to Putin would be a wise thing from his perspective, because he believes that being able to talk to the most powerful people on the planet is an asset, not a liability. Well, that would hold true if it weren’t for the fact that the United States is in an adversarial relationship with Russia. And, very sadly, we know through historical precedent and recent practice that just having a good relationship with the top leader of a country doesn’t always result in the good outcomes you’d want to see.

Putin has made it clear that he personally considers that Russia is actually at war with the United States. The war in Ukraine is depicted by Putin as a war with the United States and with the West, and increasingly, a host of other adversaries of the United States are forming a bloc with Russia, including China, Iran and North Korea. We’ve got reports in the last week of thousands of North Korean soldiers being sent into Russia for training and potentially to the battlefield in Ukraine. So, here we have a former president, perhaps a future president, who is focused on his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, and not on the actual circumstances of what’s going on in the relationship between Russia and the United States.

What is it that Putin wants from Trump?

Putin has made his interest in the United States crystal clear. He talks about it all the time. What he wants is the weakening of the United States. He wants the United States out of international affairs. And one could assume that if he is having conversations with President Trump, what Putin is trying to do is push his preferences, his interest in exerting Russian power and engaging in his own power plays. Putin doesn’t care about the American people. He doesn’t care about President Trump. What he really cares about is Russia’s own positions and his own interests.

Putin wants to see the United States weak. In a private conversation, he will be pushing out messages that reinforce his preferences — advising, perhaps cajoling, Trump to do or say certain things. Unfortunately, this messaging might be working — a lot of the statements that President Trump and people around him, like vice presidential candidate JD Vance, have made about the war in Ukraine sound exactly like the statements that Putin has made about his preferences for how the war in Ukraine ends.

Putin also apparently is in regular contact with Elon Musk. What do you think is happening there?

People are always asking, ‘Why does Trump admire Putin?’ One could also ask, ‘Why does Trump admire Musk?’ Because Elon Musk is now probably the single largest contributor and most vocal proponent for Trump’s reelection campaign. We’ve seen him at rallies with Trump. We’ve seen him offering prizes to potential voters for Trump. He’s constantly talking about the literally millions of dollars that he is spending in support of Trump. Musk and Trump both see themselves as members of an extraordinarily powerful class of rich men who want influence on a global scale.

Musk is something that we’ve never really seen before. People refer back to the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegie and the robber barons of the Gilded Age, or the billionaires that emerged in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. Musk is beyond that in his wealth and influence. He’s on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. His personal wealth is about the same as a medium-sized country. His bonuses are on the scale of the defense budgets of a whole host of countries.

So not only is Musk trying to bankroll Trump’s reelection, but he’s talking to Putin. He’s talking to people in China and elsewhere. Musk has global business interests. He’s part of a rich and powerful class of people who see themselves as global peers.

For members of this group, they aren’t driven by the people they represent or the companies that they represent, but by the peer group that they are in, which is an extraordinarily small group of people that are either billionaires on this scale or the leaders of major countries like [Chinese President] Xi and Putin and also potentially Trump. Their interactions are all about them figuring out how to exercise power together.

Understandably, for Musk, he’s hoping to get something out of Trump, out of Trump’s success in the elections in terms of his own businesses. But he’s also hoping to get something out of Putin as well. For Elon Musk, for Starlink and also for SpaceX, he needs access to terrestrial relay stations across the whole of the planet, including Russia and China and all of the larger territories. He needs to make sure that his satellite systems — and most of the satellites in orbit at this particular point belong to Starlink — that they’re not held at risk by hostile powers like a China or Russia. We’ve seen that Russia has the capacity to destroy satellites in space and avoiding this outcome is Musk’s bottom line in his interests.

Putting aside Starlink and SpaceX and Musk’s major businesses, he’s now the head of the most powerful and influential social media outlet, X, which has become a megaphone, not just for Musk’s own political preferences, but for other groups or individuals who want to have access to an increasingly global audience. Musk’s takeover of X has weaponized disinformation from Russia, from China, Iran, North Korea and other countries that have the United States as an adversary. And we have to ask, why is Musk not stopping that?

Because, again, his loyalty is not necessarily to the United States, where most of his companies are based. He’s operating on a global scale. So when we start to see all of these connections between Musk talking to Putin, Musk supporting Trump, we’re now in a different place than we’ve been in the past. We’ve not really ever had someone operating on this kind of scale, because of the massive advances in technology and interstate communication.

Is there a contradiction between Musk’s interests and the interests of the U.S. economy?

Musk has had a very positive impact on the U.S. economy. He’s generated a lot of innovation and spurred others into action. But Musk is also a billionaire businessman, a future trillionaire businessperson, who seeks power. He seeks to not just get contracts from the state, but to try to capture the state, which is, frankly, what he’s doing in supporting Trump’s election.

Musk is hoping to actually own the state. He sees Trump, obviously, as a pathway to power. He’s making this pretty explicit. So you’ve got to ask the question, what happens next? That’s where you need to start worrying about longer-term impacts on the economy and the country.

What we’ve seen in a host of other countries is that where you get an oligarchy in control, you also have a more autocratic leadership. You start to see the chipping away of the rule of law. You start to see the squeezing of the economy, as there’s deregulation in favor of particular interests and then a much more reduced space for other people to enter into the economy.

So you see Musk as not just being a billionaire, but as being an oligarch? Does that mean you see oligarchy as something that’s emerging in the United States?

We’ve been on this path for quite some time, because over the last several years, as the result of the financial crisis back in 2008, 2009 and then the coronavirus pandemic on top of it, a lot of smaller or weaker businesses went under. Other companies that were more robust have bought out competitors in various sectors. You’ve seen a lot of consolidation in business sectors over time.

The big billionaires tend to just totally dominate their sectors. That’s true with Musk and that’s the same with Amazon and Jeff Bezos. You know, we can go on and on with examples. But what this all means is that small businesses have tended to suffer. Small entrepreneurs who wanted to stay afloat, either in the online space or the mom-and-pop stores have found it impossible to compete. In an oligarchy, you see even more of that.

We’ve had consolidation in grocery chains, right? And in all kinds of different areas of the economy that hit the consumer. The average American, in an oligarchy, you’re not likely to see your grocery prices go down, right? People have been extraordinarily concerned about inflation. And you know, the sad fact of inflation is that prices tend to stay up, even if inflation slows down or disappears. And in an oligarchy, that’s even more the case for consumer goods. The less competition, the higher prices go.

So anybody who runs a small business, anybody who wants to make their own way in business, anyone who has aspirations to do the kinds of revolutionary things that Bezos or Musk or anybody else in this billionaire club was able to do earlier in their careers will have much less of a chance of succeeding. I don’t think that that’s where the average American wants to see the U.S. go. A free market should allow free entry for other people into the market, and that’s not what you see in an oligarchy.

People admire the business skills of Musk and Trump. Where’s the danger in having people like that holding powerful positions in government?

It’s that ultimately, they’re all about their own profits and power. We’ve seen members of the Trump family get more and more lucrative business deals that they certainly wouldn’t have done unless they’d had proximity to power. These are all hallmarks of countries around the world where we see people’s proximity to the state, people’s proximity to other big businesses and billionaires, as really the only way to enter into the economic system. I personally don’t want to see an America like this, and I don’t think any other American voter would want to see America go down the path where the only people who can get ahead and make profits for their businesses are those who are in positions of proximity to the people who are in charge. You get a shrinking of the economic system, and also the political system, when everything is centered around a very small class of very powerful business people and political people who are essentially fused together. The rest of us are incidental to that class of people.

You have written that Putin’s time in the KGB and the skills that he developed as a KGB operative are very important to understanding how he operates as a leader. He obviously is used to dealing with oligarchs. Do you see a connection between his skills as a KGB agent and how he might be interacting with Trump?

I absolutely do. I mean, the one thing that we’ve got to remember is that all of these guys have big egos. Putin says himself, and he has said this in all of his early interviews and in a semi-autobiographical book that was written at the beginning of his time in power, that his biggest skill is working with people. What he means by that is manipulating people, working on people. And I’ve seen it up close, time and time again. It’s not that Putin is wielding compromising information on Trump. The thing that he’s wielding is people’s ability to compromise themselves because of their need for flattery, for self-reinforcement, for affirmation.

Trump’s affinity with Putin is based on the fact that he thinks that Putin is a guy like him, another strong man. Trump has said over and over again that the people he admires the most are the strong men. He loathes weakness and people who are flawed in some way. Women fall into that category because he assumes that they’re all weak. Just look at the language that he’s been using about Kamala Harris and all the other denigrating comments he makes.

That’s the kind of thing that Putin knows how to play into, to try to puff peoples’ egos up. Putin is a master. He’s always giving people the impression that if he just sits down with them everything will be great. Trump has been saying this, I’ll just sit down with Vladimir Putin and I’ll solve the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Putin talking to Musk is the same thing. It’s all about, if we talk together, because we are peers, the big guys, then we can resolve everything. It’s a very dangerous idea to think that the only people who can and will resolve things in this world is this group of men who just get together to talk.

I’m going to give an example of this, of how it’s extraordinarily easy for Putin to manipulate people. In Helsinki, at the infamous [2018] summit meeting between Putin and Trump, people focus on what might have happened between them behind closed doors and what happened at the press conference where Trump was quick to praise Putin for being more trustworthy than his own advisers. But there was a lunch prior to the press conference, and I personally saw there how Putin could easily goad Trump into saying terrible things about his fellow Americans. He goaded Trump into talking about Joe Biden, who at that point wasn’t yet a candidate for president, but was likely to be, and also about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and about other political figures. Trump went on and on throwing other Americans, fellow Americans, under the bus, in front of a person who really does not care about America and certainly does not care about Americans. Putin was smirking. I was shocked.

I’m no longer shocked, but I just kept thinking about how Trump has no filter. So what else is he saying to Putin about other people? What vulnerabilities is he opening up? An American president should be protecting the interests of Americans, not just of himself.

When we talk about oligarchy, most of us are used to thinking about that as being something that only happens in an autocratic state like Russia. Is there a connection between oligarchy and autocracy?

In Russia in the 1990s, there was a class of about seven business oligarchs who bankrolled Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996 and then started to divide up the state assets among themselves. Those oligarchs had an enormous amount of political power at the time, because Yeltsin was very weak as a president. When Vladimir Putin came in in 2000, he began to change things, to dismantle democratic processes, and there was a flip in the power relationship. Over time, he became a much stronger president and they became weaker. First those oligarchs, those initial business people, captured the state, and then Putin captured them.

As it happens, many of those early oligarchs took over media outlets, and what we saw in Russia is that they were some of Putin’s first political targets. Over time, we saw Putin exerting power by using these oligarchs to help chip away at the checks and balances in the system. The system itself became a kind of circle and cycle of self-enrichment. Putin and the oligarchs ran the country, but also owned the country simultaneously. And Putin took a cut out of their businesses.

That’s how oligarchical systems operate. Russia became incredibly corrupt. The essence of an oligarchy is the mutually reinforcing interests of a class of people in business and people in power working together to keep society under control. They seek control of all of the assets. They focus on power and the economy and on profit and their personal prosperity, rather than the prosperity of the country and its citizens writ large.

We’ve seen more billionaires operating news organizations in the United States. Rupert Murdoch, obviously. Now we have two billionaire owners of American newspapers preventing their newspapers, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, from making an endorsement in the presidential election. Do you see this as connected?

We can see this in every single case where a country has started to slide towards autocracy. No matter what people might think about bias in the media, in national newspapers, the press, online publications, these outlets are one of two main ways that regular people have to check power inside of the country, the other one being the courts. We’ve seen over and over again in autocratic and oligarchical settings that the courts become stacked in favor of the people who are already running the country, and once newspapers get taken over by business interests, those newspapers become less about free speech and more about profits or political influence for the person who owns them. And if that billionaire owner has other businesses that are tied to the state, like state service contracts, then that becomes incredibly problematic.

I think sadly, we’re now seeing a very similar pattern in the U.S. In the case of the Washington Post, the publisher said that the Washington Post would no longer make a presidential political endorsement at almost exactly the same time as senior members of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ other major business that relies on government contracts in the space field, met with Trump. The quid pro quo there is pretty obvious. It’s extraordinarily troubling, because this is the kind of a pattern that one would never have expected to see in the United States.

Is that one of the things that is different in 2024 compared with 2016 or 2020?

Yes. You’re starting to see that newspaper owners are worried about the other parts of their business and how that will be affected by a Trump who might be vengeful against them. That’s one of Trump’s hallmarks. He’s already talked about the media as the enemy of the state, but he has also targeted their owners in the past. He has already made an example of Jeff Bezos, who was punished for his criticisms when Trump was in power previously by Trump trying to deny Amazon major government contracts. That’s exactly a hallmark of an oligarchy or of an a