In farewell address, Biden warns about new gilded age of tech robber barons

With nothing to lose, outgoing US President Joe Biden finally took the gloves off in his farewell address from the Oval Office and warned Americans that a tech-fuelled oligarchy might destroy democracy in the country.

According to Biden, a new gilded age of “robber barons” will erode Americans’ freedoms unless the government ensures that the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share of taxes and aren’t allowed to exercise outsized power.

Biden’s remarks seem to have been deliberately tailored to echo US President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex. The current head of the state instead described a “tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”

In his eyes, a new “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence” is forming. It’s quite obvious what and who Biden was talking about – the tech elites who are now the richest individuals in the world.

Big tech CEOs are currently at the top of Forbes’ billionaires list – Tesla, SpaceX, and X owner Elon Musk (net worth $435 billion), Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (net worth $237 billion), and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $213 billion).

They’re all buddies of the President-elect Donald Trump now. Musk spent more than $250 million helping Trump get elected, and Zuckerberg and Bezos have each given a million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

They also went to bend their knees to the President-elect in Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida. They all will attend Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

In his 15-minute long speech, Biden seemed to indirectly single out Zuckerberg who recently decided to retreat from fact-checking on Meta platforms and even spoke of “censorship” that needs to be eradicated from social media.

Americans are being “buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power,” said Biden, adding that ending fact-checking on social media equals letting the truth be “smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”

It’s pretty ironic that right when Biden was speaking about fact-checking, Trump’s incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt was sharing a now-deleted post on X that falsely claimed Biden had delivered a prerecorded speech.

Um… what?!?! https://t.co/jAnuSk21E7

undefined Karoline Leavitt (@karolineleavitt) January 16, 2025

“We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power,” said Biden, who has in the past blamed his poor popularity with the public for misinformation online.

To America, the outgoing president offered a few ways to “confront these powerful forces” – reform of the tax code, elimination of the flow of hidden sources of money into political campaigns, establishing 18-year term limits for members of the Supreme Court, and banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

Federal Reserve data says that the wealthiest 0.1% of the country combined holds more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50% combined.

Biden reminded his audience of the time when Americans “stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trust” during the last Gilded Age over a century ago.

“They didn't punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers want the right to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal and helped put us on a path to building the largest middle-class, most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen. We've got to do that again,” he said.