When President-elect Trump held a press availability as he was speaking to Republican Governors last week he rattled off a number of big names who’d made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of the new Don. He actually sounded rather surprised by it, saying, “they all came. Jeff Bezos came, Bill Gates came, Mark Zuckerberg came, many of them came numerous times, the bankers have all come, everybody’s coming. I haven’t had anyone say anything bad about me. I’m not used to it.” He believes they come because they are dazzled by the power and strength of his massive electoral victory (like nobody’s ever seen before!) but none of them are as dumb or as deluded as he is so that’s obviously not the case. I’m going to guess they’re dazzled by the richest man in the world’s proximity to him and they want a piece of that action. Elon Musk has opened the door to a new style of oligarchy, American style. The history of Russia after the fall of communism is instructive here. Under the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, in the 1990s, a group of snake oil salesmen and scam artists swooped in to take advantage of the opening that “shock therapy” provided and gobbled up valuable state owned properties and resources at fire sale prices and made themselves into billionaires overnight. They were thoroughly corrupt and basically robbed the Russian people blind. When Vladimir Putin eventually replaced the discredited Yeltsin, he called them…