Dem
47
GOP
53
Washington D.C. has traditionally been a place where power was more important than money. Donald Trump is changing that. He has nominated an unprecedented 13 billionaires to the cabinet and other very high government jobs. He is indeed a man of the (very rich) people. The combined assets of these billionaires exceeds $460 billion (in large part due to Elon Musk's $400 billion, but the rest aren't exactly paupers). In contrast, Joe Biden's cabinet had a combined net worth of $118 million. If the staff mathematician's old-fashioned calculator is working correctly, the Trump cabinet is worth about 3900x the Biden cabinet. Even if we exclude Musk, since he distorts the result so much, the remaining Trump cabinet members combined are at least 500x richer than the combined Biden cabinet members.
Some people will see this as the Gilded Age, Part II, but it is not. John D. Rockefeller never moved into William McKinley's White House, nor was he anything vaguely equivalent to a co-president. He was just a rich businessman.
One effect of having a cabinet this wealthy is that it is putting pressure on (part of) the D.C. real estate market. With billionaire after billionaire bidding for the biggest castles in the choicest and most protected areas, the upscale housing market is exploding. Some real estate agents have taken to cold calling people who own very fancy houses that even a billionaire might like and asking if they would be open to an incredible offer they couldn't refuse. Presumably every time someone said yes, the agent would contact the billionaires and tell them the property was available for the right bid and might they be interested? And the right bid might not be so much. D.C. housing is cheap compared to New York or Southampton, where a really, really nice house might go for $100 million. In D.C. you couldn't spend even a paltry $25 million on a house if you tried. The top neighborhoods are Kalorama, Massachusetts Avenue Heights, and Georgetown. (V)