Although not elected by the American people, the world’s wealthiest person, a South African businessman, is running the United States government with the blessing of its chief executive and without meaningful opposition from the legislature or definitive censure by the judiciary. What is going on? Has business trumped politics, and if so, doesn’t that raise an interesting question: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? In pondering this, my research led me to an American billionaire; a German emeritus professor of political science at the Berlin Social Sciences Center; and a Dutch former member of the European Parliament, now a Fellow at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, all of whom had quite a lot to say. First, Peter Thiel, the billionaire. Peter Thiel’s Wiki bio says he co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk; he was the initial outside investor in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook; and he co-founded Palantir, the big-d...