'Mind-boggling wealth': Trump said to be assembling 'government of billionaires'

Donald Trump has tapped at least a dozen fellow billionaires for high-level roles in his incoming administration, including the world's wealthiest man.

The once and future president's projected Cabinet is worth at least $10 billion, according to research by Axios and the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness, but with Trump's appointees to slash government spending, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the top of his administration has net worth higher than the GDP of hundreds of countries, including Chile and New Zealand.

"President-elect Trump has assembled an administration of unprecedented, mind-boggling wealth — smashing his own first-term record by billions of dollars," Axios reported. "President Biden's Cabinet, by comparison, was worth an estimated $118 million when he took office, according to Forbes."

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Musk spent a reported $277 million of his vast fortune to elect Trump and other Republicans, and his net worth has jumped an estimated $70 billion since the Nov 5 election to around $334 billion last week, and the president-elect has tapped him and the billionaire entrepreneur Ramaswamy to co-chair the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to recommend ways to shrink the federal budget.

"Trump's gilded Cabinet is the product of an election in which billionaires spent like never before in U.S. history — mostly on behalf of Republicans," Axios wrote. "And yet it was Democrats who shed major support among working-class voters, suggesting Trump's populist message — and the aspirational riches he represents — once again were underestimated."

Billionaires have been chosen to head the departments of Commerce (Howard Lutnick), Education (Linda McMahon), Interior (Doug Burgum) and Treasury (Scott Bessent), as well as the the Small Business Administration (Kelly Loeffler) and NASA (Jared Isaacman), and Trump also announced Thursday that tech investor and Musk pal David Sacks would serve as White House AI and crypto czar.

"With every billionaire appointee comes a minefield of conflicts of interest and ethical concerns — exactly the kind of swampy conditions that Trump has vowed to drain," Axios noted.