One thing about billionaires in the US is they keep making more of them. In 1990, there were about 60. Ten years later, there were 298. Today there are almost 750, enough to fill a pair of jumbo jets (assuming some could be persuaded to travel in economy). Billionaire status is no longer enough to make you a household name. Those with the Scrooge McDuck or John D Rockefeller status of people “so rich they are famous for being rich” are more properly identified as centibillionaires: people worth more than $100bn.

Of the top 10 centibillionaires in the US, all but one (Warren Buffett) made their money in the tech sector that has boomed since the turn of the millennium. In his speech, Biden tweaked President Dwight D Eisenhower’s warning from 1961 about the “military industrial complex” to raise the alarm about a “tech-industrial complex”. Unmentioned by either was the longstanding financial-industrial complex. Over the past several decades, the revolving door in American politics spat you out in one place more often than others: Wall Street. And the overlap between the private sector and the governing class was long dominated by one investment bank in particular, Goldman Sachs.

But the more eye-catching arrivals in Washington DC are the ones from Silicon Valley. Tech figures such as venture capitalist David Sacks – tapped to be “AI and crypto tsar” in Trump’s cabinet – and Musk, slated to head the advisory “department of government efficiency”, walk the trail blazed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who placed a risky bet on supporting Trump in 2016, back when those such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were loudly criticising him.