Steve Bannon Warns Republicans the ‘Oligarchs’ Will Abandon Them: ‘They’re With Us – But Only Temporarily’ 

Steve Bannon struck a word caution for Republicans who have fully embraced tech “oligarchs.”

The former White House adviser to President Donald Trump has spoken derisively of certain Silicon Valley billionaires including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg, who banned Trump from Facebook after the 2021 Capitol riot, reinstated the president’s account on the platform in 2023 and appeared at his inauguration last month. Musk, meanwhile, spent at least $277 million to return Trump to the White House. For his reward, Musk was named the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which he has used to gut various federal agencies.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan caught up with Bannon on Wednesday for a brief interview that aired on CNN’s The Source hours later. Bannon told him:

You can tell President Trump doesn’t totally trust the oligarchs. We’re putting in very tough antitrust people into the Justice Department and to the alphabet agencies… Look, I’m not a conservative, right? I’m a Republican ’cause I’m a registered Republican. I’m really a populist nationalist…

And by the way, those oligarchs – and people on CNN are gonna understand it – just like they’ve turned on you now, right? They’ve abandoned the progressive left. They will abandon us and do the same thing. They seek power. Right now, their feeling is they can see the math and they see that we have a built-in coalition. So they’re with us – but only temporarily.

While Bannon has long supported dismantling the administrative state, he has criticized Musk’s approach.

“He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions,” he said in an interview with UnHerd this week while calling Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.”

And last week, Bannon warned Trump and Musk against slashing Medicaid.

“Medicaid, you got to be careful because a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”

Watch above via CNN.