In the 13 years since the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unprecedented amounts of money in politics, a new class of megadonors has emerged with more power than we’ve seen since the age of the robber barons.
These billionaire power brokers include people most Americans don’t know nearly enough about — like Richard Uihlein, Jeffrey Yass, Peter Thiel, Stephen Schwarzman, and Harlan Crow.
They’re pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs and political campaigns and wielding enormous power behind the scenes to pick winners and losers, set policy priorities, and drive media narratives.
But following the dark-money trail and connecting the dots to votes and policy outcomes requires dogged countless hours poring over documents, filing freedom of information requests, and interviewing sources on background.
This is the fundamental spade work of journalism. But with so many news outlets struggling financially, investigative reporters are becoming an endangered species at the very time when this work is needed most.
The Intercept is a nonprofit news outlet founded to do the hard-hitting investigative journalism so badly needed in this new era of billionaire dark-money megadonors.
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The Intercept’s reporters are digging deep to expose the billionaire megadonors funding today’s GOP, including:
- Shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who gave lavishly to election denial efforts in 2020, including the “Stop the Steal” rally preceding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, based on our most recent reporting, are now pouring money into an effort to rewrite the Ohio state constitution to preemptively overturn the results of several ballot measures this November.
- Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and tech billionaire who pumped money into Trump’s 2016 campaign before personally overseeing the Defense Department transition and then nearly single-handedly elevating the campaigns of ideological fringe candidates like Arizona U.S. Senate GOP nominee Blake Masters and current U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio.
- Steve Schwarzman, the top Trump and Mitch McConnell donor and CEO of Blackstone, which The Intercept exposed for funding massive deforestation in the Amazon.
- Jeffrey Yass, the Pennsylvania billionaire who spent nearly $50 million supporting Republicans in the 2022 midterms and is, as reported by The Intercept, the sole donor propping up a super PAC created to defeat progressive Democrats in primaries and boost corporate Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema (Sinema is now an independent).
These are the power players in American politics today, right alongside Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Trump, and congressional leaders McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.
But exposing how these shady billionaires exert their power isn’t easy, and it’s not cheap either. Much of their spending isn’t reported, and their private meetings with politicians aren’t televised on C-SPAN.
