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Page

Just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump was scheduled to return to the White House, the coterie of American tech oligarchs who played a decisive role in re-electing him was busy exerting their own power in ways that suggest the MAGA coalition may be heading for a crack-up.

Trump famously invited fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an effort to cut government spending and federal payrolls. But in December Musk went rogue and used his vast social media reach to scuttle a spending bill he didn't like, complicating Trump's and the GOP's fiscal plans in the new session of Congress.

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Email Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.

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