From Putin to Musk: the making of a modern-day oligarch

Anyone who thinks of oligarchs as a strictly post-Soviet phenomenon should reflect that the original definition comes from Aristotle, writing nearly 2,400 years ago: “Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy.”

Oligarchs are an eternal type that is now proliferating worldwide, west as well as east. Many of them run countries. Yet oligarchs are strangely understudied, says David Lingelbach, who with Valentina Rodríguez Guerra has written a new book, The Oligarchs’ Grip, which reworks Aristotle’s definition. An oligarch, say the authors, is “someone who secures and reproduces wealth or power, then transforms one into the other”. So: what makes an oligarch — especially today?