There’s an old proverb (opinions differ on whether it’s Indian or African) that “when elephants fight the grass gets trampled.” That observation concisely describes the terrain of Tevi Troy’s latest book, The Power and the Money, which charts the epic battles between some of America’s wealthiest individuals and the country’s most powerful officeholder, the president of the United States. A senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and former deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, Troy aims to “help put the current period of bipartisan hostility towards corporations in context and judge whether we are living through an anomalous period or a challenging reality that will continue into the future.” Although Donald Trump’s second term suggests a change in the political atmosphere regarding big business right now, The Power and the Money remains a valuable guide for any CEO trying to navigate the treacherous waters of national politics that the political tide can shift suddenly, leaving ships sailing along on their confident way abruptly stranded on the rocks.
In that regard, one sometimes wishes the book had been organized more thematically rather than chronologically by presidential administration, so that following the trials and tribulations of Henry Ford or Lee Iacocca or Bill Gates didn’t require flipping back and forth through multiple chapters. Still, Troy’s chief advice to business leaders comes out loud and clear: engage with the White House at your own risk—but failing to engage is even worse.
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Although tycoons and politicians, including presidents, had their tiffs over tariffs in the 19th century, the real battle between business and government got going with Theodore Roosevelt, who saw a legitimate activist role for government to rein in “the malefactors of great wealth,” in his phrase. Curbing those supposed malefactors became a hallmark of Progressive politics, from the Sherman Antitrust Act to Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms of Wall Street after the 1929 crash.
One could even argue (though Troy doesn’t) that the creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1914 was meant to break the influence of private bankers like J. Pierpont Morgan who had died the year before, and who had twice used his own wealth to stabilize the American economy. The Federal Reserve would instead now do the same for the public good. How successful it’s been, readers will have to decide for themselves.
John D. Rockefeller became the principal early victim of the political sea change brought by the Progressive movement when the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of his Standard Oil Company for violating antitrust laws. Rockefeller is one of Troy’s best examples of what happens when business leaders assume politicians will want them to enjoy their success rather than enviously pull it to pieces—as Microsoft and Google would eventually learn.
For his part, instead of ignoring politics, Henry Ford clumsily attempted to manipulate and control public policy directly, first by promoting a general peace in Europe during the First World War with his ludicrous Peace Ship cruises (Greta Thunberg, take note) and then trying to keep the United States neutral during the Second. Instead, Ford earned only the enmity of politicians like Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Troy’s lesson: if you want to beat the politicians at their own game, it’s better to remain behind the scenes, rather than try to run the show yourself.
Yet, for some reason automobile moguls have a strange attraction to the latter strategy. As an executive at Ford, Lee Iacocca learned the best way to fend off burdensome new regulations for his automobiles was by publicly backing President Richard Nixon’s broader economic agenda. As Troy writes, “sometimes the best way to get what you want is to give them what they want,” i.e., in Iacocca’s case, supporting Nixon’s policy of wage and price controls.
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Iacocca used the skills he’d gained in manipulating politicians to get Washington’s help in bailing out a failing Chrysler Corporation through a series of loan guarantees, thanks in large part to his support for President Jimmy Carter, at the same time managing to make corporate welfare a matter of American pride. Iacocca then pressed his luck by campaigning for a tax credit for consumers willing to buy American, instead of Japanese or German, cars. The plan didn’t work, but in the process Iacocca turned himself into a major media personality, enjoying a bestselling autobiography, and even considering a bid for the Oval Office.
So far, so good—that is, until the next election when Ronald Reagan came into office, who had little patience with government bailouts or protectionist policies against Detroit’s Japanese competitors. Instead of being a force to be reckoned with in Washington, Iacocca became an embarrassment. Troy’s other lesson: what makes you the favorite businessman with one president can make you a virtual pariah with his successor.
Some of the best chapters in The Power and the Money deal with Hollywood movie mogul Lew Wasserman, who steadily built a gargantuan media empire in Hollywood while ignoring Washington, D.C.—that is, until his company, MCA, became the subject of two federal investigations and a grand jury probe. But Wasserman learned his lesson quickly. It started with hosting a $1,000-a-plate dinner for John F. Kennedy ($11,000 today) and introducing the president to Hollywood starlets like Angie Dickinson. It paid off, too: with Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton, Wasserman became a reliable presidential fundraiser, regardless of political party. And so, in Troy’s words, “the first instinct of presidents when faced with tough issues having to do with Hollywood would be the same as Clinton’s: ‘Call Lew.’” The chairman of MCA was not only buying protection but a piece of the action.
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On the other hand, Bill Gates, and to a lesser degree Steve Jobs, didn’t learn the pitfalls of ignoring Washington until it was too late—in Gates’s case, until a massive and expensive antitrust suit. But Gates and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs realized soon enough that one could navigate Washington politics by investing heavily in progressive causes. Being woke covered over some of the shame of being a successful capitalist and bought a degree of immunity from a hostile media as well as from government agencies.
That model held up through the 2016 cycle, and again in 2020, when being vociferously anti-Trump bought tech moguls some of that same protection. Somone who didn’t catch on was Elon Musk: his hero status as maker of electric vehicles evaporated as soon as he made tentative noises of support for Trump’s first term. That disapproval would grow to a deafening crescendo during Trump’s second.
By then another businessman had not only learned the key lessons about how to deal with Washington but was writing his own rule book. That was Donald Trump.
Trump occupies a strange place in The Power and The Money. After all, if one of the key lessons of the book is to stay behind the scenes, Trump went totally the other way. Instead, he managed to turn being a media celebrity into a springboard for his first presidential run in 2016 and then his triumphant return to the Oval Office in 2024. Even serial federal indictments and midnight FBI raids became building blocks for electoral success.
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Trump would seem a prime candidate, therefore, for Troy’s analysis of how a businessman can creatively engage with political power. Instead we meet Trump when he’s already president, and other CEOs like J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon are having to find their way in dealing with a dynamic and mercurial chief executive who defies every convention and disdains the political establishment they are used to dealing with, while enjoying almost inexhaustible public support.
It’s a shame The Money and the Power appeared before Trump resumed office this January. Troy missed the opportunity to chart the bromance between Elon Musk and Trump in the DOGE saga, and their bitter public breakup. He also lost out on watching a new generation of tech billionaires like Vivek Ramaswami, David Sacks, Bill Ackman, and others cozy up to the Trump cause, in ways that have allowed them to capture key roles in the new administration—not only ambassadorships but heading important regulatory agencies.
The fact that the world’s three wealthiest people, who had been Trump critics—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—attended Trump’s second inauguration should signal that another sea change in the business-versus-government relation is here.
Or maybe it just means they read advance copies of Tevi Troy’s new book.
