‘Your actions after that assassination attempt were inspiring,” the richest man in the world recently told the once (and possibly future) most powerful man in the world. “I think that is America, that is strength under fire.”
Thus spake Elon Musk during a “Spaces” conversation with Donald Trump in the midst of the former president’s campaign to retake the White House. The mercurial CEO’s fawning interview of the equally volatile ex–commander in chief appeared to reflect genuine admiration, but it surely included no small measure of self-interest, or at least the interests of Musk’s many holdings.
This intricate dance between business and politics forms the unifying thread of The Power and the Money, presidential historian Tevi Troy’s meticulously researched and vividly drawn history of the relationship between the White House and American industry, from manufacturing to media, and from energy to finance and technology.
A veteran of the executive branch, a professor at Yeshiva University, and a COMMENTARY contributor, Troy has written several engaging histories of the presidency. The Power and the Money is similarly learned and chock-full of revealing and amusing anecdotes, but it’s his first—and possibly the first, period—to focus on the interplay between capital and power. Troy skillfully traces the chemistry (both good and bad) among 18 CEOs and 26 presidents, comprising “friendships and enmities, successes and failures.”
The Elon Musk of his day, Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, famously said, “I care not who is president, provided I have the ‘pull’ with his secretary of the Treasury.” That indifference may have suited his earlier years in power, but it proved fatal to his company when Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressives came to power and broke up Standard Oil on the grounds that it was a monopoly. Indeed, following his reelection, Roosevelt lamented how Rockefeller had “antagonized me before my election, when I was getting through the Bureau of Corporations bill, and I then promptly threw down the gauntlet to it.”
By contrast, the financial pioneer J.P. Morgan had earlier attracted favorable attention from the White House, with President Benjamin Harrison writing glowingly in 1892 about “Mr. Morgan’s very high standing” while marveling how “no one could better represent the financial world in New York.” President Grover Cleveland consulted Morgan intensively about averting a financial meltdown. More than a century later, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon performed a similar service, working with George W. Bush, the first MBA president, to mitigate the 2008 subprime-mortgage-driven market meltdown.
Henry Ford’s relationship with numerous presidents was more mixed. The founder of America’s most important automobile company took a broader view of public life than did Rockefeller, once noting that “the highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more service for the betterment of life,” including “helping to solve the social problem.” Initially, though, Ford vigorously opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War, going so far as to charter a 1915 “Peace Ship” in a hopeless effort to persuade Europeans to cease their fighting.
Ford would eventually patch things up with Wilson and enjoyed friendly—and lucrative—friendships with his successors. But his anti-Semitism and perceived closeness to Hitler (who had lauded him as “the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America”) soured the public’s perception of Ford and withered his bond with President Franklin Roosevelt. He later made amends during World War II by opening the Willow Run munitions factory.
FDR also clashed with Henry Luce, the Republican magnate of a media empire that encompassed TIME, once musing openly about how “something has got to be done about Luce and his papers” for adopting a “definitely unpatriotic” stance. But then-general Dwight Eisenhower warmed to Luce, who reciprocated with a flattering editorial that helped Ike win in 1952. (As the joke went, “TIME was even-handed during election years: Half the time it praised the Republicans, and half the time it damned the Democrats.”)
Similarly, Hollywood moguls like the original Warner Brothers and MCA’s Lew Wasserman favored FDR, JFK, Jimmy Carter, and other liberal luminaries even as they kept open back channels to Ronald Reagan, a movie star and head of the Screen Actors Guild before he entered politics—relationships that paid off handsomely. Troy argues that Wasserman managed to persuade Reagan to scotch a 1982 Federal Communications Commission deregulatory policy that would have harmed the movie studios.
The technology executives of the late-20th and early-21st centuries largely followed the same pattern, with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg initially adopting a Rockefellerian suspicion of and aversion to the White House. Over time, these giants, too, would grudgingly come to appreciate the need to make nice with Washington. Gates found out the hard way, after the Clinton administration cracked down on Microsoft for antitrust violations. He told a young Zuckerberg to “get an office there, now.” Apple’s Tim Cook cultivated a far more active presence in the capital than his predecessor, while Musk’s evolving politics continue to color his checkered relationships with Obama, Trump, and Biden. My only quibble with The Power and the Money is that Troy spends nearly half of the book on events beginning in the 1990s, which are both better known and less interesting than the fascinating relationships he excavates from the 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries.
Troy concludes his analysis by urging CEOs to be purposeful and careful, agile and consistent, personal and proactive—and cognizant that, regardless of their particular set of skills, “corporate unpopularity creates significant vulnerabilities for companies and even entire industries.” Despite—or maybe because of—these sensitivities, Troy argues that “companies cannot give up on Washington” and, along with the presidents they collaborate with, must reinforce “strong and confident leadership” that “values competition and innovation.”
Ultimately, Troy posits that CEOs and presidents end up connecting to one another on a level that transcends the particulars of their métiers. “No one in the entire government is [their] peer,” he writes, “which makes business leaders, who can be similarly lonely at the top of their own industries, among the rarest people who can relate to presidential loneliness and offer personal thoughts about other personalities and power players.” Both types of chief executive share more in common than even they know.
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