Americans tend to think of oligarchs as exclusively Russian—a relic of the Soviet collapse, men in fur coats and yachts. But the reality is far more expansive and unsettling. Forty-eight countries currently have oligarchs serving as heads of state or government, representing 43 percent of the world’s population living under oligarch-run states.
Dr. David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodriguez Guerra, both professors and researchers, recently released their second book together, “Games Without Thrones: Eight Leadership Lessons from Oligarchs,” which offers a framework for understanding how the fusion of wealth and power operates in the modern era.
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Defining the Oligarch
“Oligarchy is not a Russian phenomenon,” said Rodriguez Guerra, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Oligarchs. “We find them across the political systems, across regions. They are not only old men. They can be young, they can be women, they can be in Latin America, they can be in Africa, they can be everywhere.”
The distinction matters. Being wealthy does not automatically make someone an oligarch.
“Aristotle had it exactly right when he said that the oligarchs are the wealthy few who govern us,” said Lingelbach. “We update the definition because we’re social scientists and talk about people who fuse wealth and power.”
Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest individuals globally, serves as a telling example. Despite his enormous fortune, he does not fit the oligarch profile under their framework.
“The key question is not only how rich are you? The question is, what do you do with that wealth and how do you relate that with political power?” said Rodriguez Guerra.
Lingelbach added, “Buffett has been relatively reserved in his use of his wealth to influence society, whether in the US or abroad…I don’t think Valentina or I would see him as a particularly noteworthy example of an oligarch. I would say that he’s a good example of how you can be really rich and not really be an oligarch.”
Conversely, the authors classify former Vice President Al Gore as an oligarch—a surprising designation. In their classification, Gore first accumulated political power, then leveraged it into substantial wealth through businesses, investments, and media ventures.
Risk Versus Uncertainty
One of the book’s central arguments challenges conventional wisdom about leadership under pressure. “Most leaders do not fail because they take too much risk,” the authors write. “They fail because they confuse uncertainty with risk.”
This distinction proves crucial. Risk implies calculable probabilities—like a 60 percent chance of rain. Uncertainty describes situations where the model itself is incomplete.
“Under uncertainty, the model itself can be incomplete,” Rodriguez Guerra explained. “We may not know what are all the relevant variables. We may not know maybe how people are going to behave. So the probabilities we’re assigning may give us a false and a small sense of precision.”
Oligarchs thrive in this environment. “Uncertainty is an oxygen for these people. They lean into it. The foggier it is, the more excited they are,” said Lingelbach. “Effective oligarchs…lean into these situations that the rest of us are running away from. They are excited by the opportunities that are created as a result of the reshuffling of the deck.”
Leadership Tactics
The authors identify several strategies employed by successful oligarchs. One involves building redundant control systems—deliberately creating overlapping networks rather than eliminating inefficiencies. “From a traditional management perspective, that looks messy or that looks inefficient. But from a power perspective, it’s rational,” said Rodriguez Guerra. “If one person fails, it means that another one is there or another one did it correctly.”
Another tactic involves viewing rules as flexible rather than fixed. “Oligarchs are more likely to ask who wrote the rule and who enforces them, how flexible they are, and maybe if they can be changed,” Rodriguez Guerra said. “The cost of bending a rule may be much lower to you than for everyone else.”
Cheating, paradoxically, becomes a tool for gathering intelligence about institutional strength. “Cheating is a way to gather information. You see how the system responds,” Lingelbach noted, citing a Czech oligarch who deliberately tested boundaries to measure the limits of his own power.
These tactics can serve to explain President Trump’s actions and behaviors. While not quite the eight-dimensional chess his die-hard supporters claim he’s playing, he’s also not irrational as Democrats and Progressives like to think. There is a method to the madness – an oligarchic one.
The Tragic Element
The scholars also examine the tragic trajectory many oligarchs face. “They pursue a course of action long after alternatives have disappeared because abandoning it would mean admitting that the cost was too high,” they write. “In that sense, tragedy is not about error alone, is about irreversibility.”
An example of this could be President Trump’s Iran war.
But according to the authors, Cleopatra serves as perhaps the most famous historical example—an incredibly capable ruler who ultimately trapped herself through her own strategic choices. “She failed to realize that the walls were closing in,” said Lingelbach. “She couldn’t get out of the trap that she had more or less created for herself.”
What Comes Next
The authors believe this reality will persist for decades. “History shows oligarchs emerge whenever uncertainty outruns institutions,” they write. “When certainty fades, authority fragments, risk increases.”
Their ultimate message calls for honest assessment.
“People need to step up. They need to reset. They need to figure out how can they be effective leaders given the world in which we actually live as opposed to the one that’s becoming more and more fantastical,” said Lingelbach. “You can be a better leader in this world. You can be an effective leader. You can be actually a good leader, a good in the moral sense leader. But you have to start with what’s the reality.”
For those seeking to understand contemporary power structures, “Games Without Thrones” offers a sobering but necessary perspective. The book is available at oligarchcenter.org.
