Broligarchy

Broligarchy is a type of governance where an oligarchy is made of a fraternity of billionaire tech bros. These men occupy leadership roles in big tech and tech-enabled businesses while being perceived by the public as tech bros. The broligarchy is also known as tech oligarchy, and is closely related to technofeudalism and technocracy.

Broligarchy is a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and bro culture.

Effect on dismantling democracy

Journalist Natalia Antelava wrote in Coda,

Unlike the Russian oligarchs, the Broligarchs of Silicon Valley have not just grabbed untold riches, they’ve created products that none of us can or want to live without.

Just as electricity changed the way we ate, slept, and worked, artificial intelligence is transforming the very fabric of our society. It’s building on the foundation laid by social media, which has already fractured the very idea of truth, legitimizing and scaling the age-old human trait of believing what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now, as the power and the ubiquity of digital services grow, so does the power of the men behind the monopolies  that have built the digital architecture of our lives [...]

It’s not Donald Trump, it’s the Peter Thiels, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world who will be making up the new rules that will govern our lives. These men, who have accumulated unprecedented wealth will now be able to translate it into unprecedented political power.

Origin of the term

According to Prospect magazine, "Broligarchy appears in surfer language in the early 2000s “when a small group of bros run a break”—referring to locals controlling a surf spot." The modern use of the terms broligarch and broligarchy can be traced to a Twitter post in 2009. Broligarchy appeared on Urban Dictionary in 2011. The terms gained wide adoption on social media during the 2024 US presidential election and the second Trump presidency. In a tweet on X in March 2024, Condé Nast editor Luke Zaleski called Elon Musk "the world's first broligarch".

The term broligarch was first used in the mainstream media in late July 2024 in a news article in The Observer by the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

In early August 2024, the term broligarch appeared in the title of articles in the Atlantic magazine by Brooke Harrington and in the English edition of Al Majalla by Bryn Haworth. The subsequent months saw a flurry of media usage following the 2024 US presidential election in November of the same year and the second inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2025.

Since August 2025, the words broligarch and broligarchy have been officially included in the Cambridge Dictionary.

Historical developments

In the 2021 book The Tyranny of Big Tech, Republican Party politician and senior United States Senate member of Missouri Josh Hawley argued that major technology companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have become tech oligarchs with overwhelming economic and political power. He describes these companies as modern-day robber barons who are draining prosperity and power from the middle class and creating a new oligarchy. Critics claimed that Hawley's book contained factual errors and accused him of using the book as a launching pad for his own political career.

References

Further reading

• Borsook, Paulina (2000). Cyberselfish: a critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high tech. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1-58648-038-7.
• Kotkin, Joel (2014). The new class conflict. Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing. ISBN 978-0-914386-28-5.
• Foroohar, Rana (2019). Don't be evil: how big tech betrayed its founding principles - and all of us. New York: Currency. ISBN 978-1-9848-2398-4.
• Moisio, Sami; Rossi, Ugo (2024). The Urban Field. Capital and Governmentality in the Age of Techno-Monopoly. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Agenda. ISBN 978-1-7882-1450-6.
• Petit, Nicolas (2020). Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-883770-1.
• Hawley, Joshua (2021). The tyranny of big tech. Washington, D.C: Regnery Publishing. ISBN 978-1-9821-3894-3.
• Suarez-Villa, Luis (2023). Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003345893. ISBN 978-1-003-34589-3.
• Norden, Lawrence; Weiner, Daniel I. (2025-02-12). "The Rise of America's Broligarchy and What to Do About It". TIME.