Maryland Governor Wes Moore recently stunned viewers on CNBC by predicting a new Democratic administration would pump the brakes on monopoly enforcement. For three years, through investigations, lawsuits and new regulations, the Biden-Harris administration has been stepping up the pressure on big companies that throw their market weight around — “turning the page on a failed experiment,” per DOJ antitrust head Jonathan Kanter. The big companies are feeling the strain. They’re praying for a policy pivot, and they’re enlisting everyone they can — including public figures like Moore, who’s cozier with big business than you might think — to help make that pivot happen.
In the CNBC interview, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin noted that “there have been a lot of calls from the donor class” for a pullback under Harris, asking Moore whether we might expect a “shift in … her regulatory views.” Moore took the cue. Harris, he predicted, would prioritize “making it easier for our large industries to be able to compete” over protecting consumers.
Moore could well be wrong; there’s plenty of reason to expect aggressive antitrust enforcement would continue under a Harris-Walz administration. But given Moore’s background, including friendships and board relationships with America’s super-wealthy corporate elite, it’s no surprise that he’s lining up on the side of big business; these relationships are what rocketed him to the top.
Moore has long been a friend of financialization. He spent five years as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in London and at Citigroup in New York. He later served on the board of clothing giant Under Armour.
But Moore’s big corporate break came in 2017, when he became CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty nonprofit that has almost no public profile outside New York City — where its wealthy board members and donors live. Robin Hood is no neighborhood charity; on top of the income from its $300 million in assets, it brings in almost $150 million a year in contributions.
Robin Hood was founded in the 1980s as a side gig by hedge-funders looking for a tax shelter, and it’s still run by financial masters of the universe. The organization does spend its money on good works, but because it operates through donor-advised funds — which aren’t quite a scam, but definitely the best tax-reduction deal available to plutocrats — its board members and their super-rich friends have saved hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, which could have gone to the kinds of social services that Robin Hood’s programs try to make up for.
With so much money in the mix, Robin Hood can afford to pay well; in 2020, it paid Wes Moore $999,728. As governor, Moore now makes “only” $180,000, but he banked millions from his Robin Hood haul, enough to spend the rest of his life living like a big-company CEO. When he was elected, he had more than a million dollars in cannabis company Green Thumb Industries (where he was also serving on the board) — a company caught up in pay-to-play allegations around cannabis legalization in Illinois and other states.
Moore’s wealth is a pittance compared to that of Robin Hood board members such as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. But compared with a career public servant like Tim Walz, who owns no stocks, bonds or real estate, Moore has done very well and spent a career hobnobbing with some of the country’s most elite wealth managers.
The big banks, Big Tech, insurance, retail — all these industries are spending huge sums on lobbying to weaken enforcement and block new rules. They’re speaking out forcefully, too; billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman gave $10 million to support Harris while calling for her to fire Lina Khan, the FTC’s top regulator who’s been bringing the hammer down.
Ironically, Blueprint — a Democratic strategy group funded by Hoffman — just put out polling that undermines Hoffman’s plea to oust Khan. According to Blueprint’s new survey, voters prefer an economic message that is “laser-focused on keeping the prices of goods and services low and those that champion policies to help working and middle-class families.” Arguably nobody in the Biden-Harris administration has done more to help working people than Khan, Kanter, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra. It makes no sense for Harris, who pledged at a recent campaign rally to “take on price gouging and bring down costs,” to ditch them.
The voices of people like Moore are likely more useful to the campaign to sack Khan and her allies than the clamoring of billionaire executives, which is transparently self-serving. It’s easy to understand why Moore is boosting these CEOs’ heavy-handed demands. But given how much our antitrust enforcers have achieved for the American people in recent years, let’s hope he’s wrong about which direction Harris is trending.
Jeff Hauser (X: @jeffhauser) is executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest watchdog.