He was one of the richest men of his time, a powerful force in business and then in government — so influential that political adversaries taunted the White House that he was “the real president.”
Today, that’s Elon Musk’s story, as the world’s richest man winds down his tumultuous time in Washington as a “special government employee” in President Donald Trump’s administration. But while Musk’s astronomical wealth and the work of his Department of Government Efficiency have been one of a kind, there are strong echoes of another businessman-turned-slasher-of-government who came to Washington just more than 100 years ago.
Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker and one of America’s wealthiest men in the early 20th century, was treasury secretary to three Republican presidents — Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover — for more than a decade in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Like Musk, Mellon came to Washington with the aim of drastically cutting back federal spending. Like Musk, he remained involved in his private businesses at the same time, as biographer David Cannadine has chronicled, sparking fierce protests from opposition Democrats. Like Musk, political opponents made him a national boogeyman and suggested that Mellon was the true power in Washington.
Three presidents served under him, the joke went. Sen. Robert La Follette Sr., a Wisconsin progressive, said Mellon was “the real president of the United States. Calvin Coolidge is merely the man who occupies the White House.”
And as Musk leaves the White House and appears to consider his political legacy, voicing concern that Trump and Republican lawmakers won’t follow through on his hopes of big spending cuts, Mellon’s own complicated legacy illustrates how difficult even titans of industry have found the task of permanently bending politics and government toward their will.
Mellon achieved his goals for a time, paring back yearly federal spending to approximately half the level it was before he took over the Treasury Department and reforming U.S. tax laws.
But the Great Depression turned the nation sharply against him and the Republican Party personified by wealthy businessmen, with Mellon becoming a political lightning rod in the way Musk has this year.
In “Mellon: An American Life,” Cannadine wrote that Mellon’s son recalled witnessing an early exercise in political social media targeting the treasury secretary: a rhyme written on a urinal at a rest stop between Pittsburgh and Washington.
“Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell,” it began, “Wall Street gave the signal, and the country went to hell.”
When Democrats took back Congress in the backlash after the Depression began, they investigated the intersection of Mellon businesses and government contracts they won while he was in the Cabinet, initiating impeachment proceedings before he resigned to take an ambassadorship.
And ultimately, Mellon saw his low-spending, laissez-faire ethos pushed aside in national politics by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which ushered in a wave of government spending and social programs that were anathema to Mellon-era Republicans.
No historical comparison lines up neatly in all respects. While Musk and Trump’s administration sought to slash programs through presidential orders and an expansive view of executive power, Mellon worked through Congress to enact his budgetary priorities.
Mellon was fabulously wealthy, thanks to investments in businesses from aluminum to oil to early airlines and beyond, but Musk’s businesses and riches are on a significantly different scale. And Mellon’s final work with the government, years later, was also of a decidedly nonpolitical nature: He established the National Gallery of Art, seeding it with his impressive private collection.
Musk’s story is far from its final chapter, with more twists and details to come even as he ends his stint at the White House. What we know for sure, though, is that wealth and power of that magnitude endure through the years.
In a twist of fate, after the Trump administration and DOGE slashed grants and staff this year, the Mellon Foundation, which was launched by Mellon’s children decades ago using part of the family fortune, stepped in to fill $15 million of the gap.
And there’s another eye-popping financial connection between the Mellon years and Musk’s time in government.
Musk was the biggest disclosed donor in the 2024 elections. The second-biggest? Timothy Mellon, Mellon’s grandson, who gave nearly $200 million in support of Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other causes, according to OpenSecrets — paving the way for Musk’s stint with DOGE in Washington.
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