The odd thing about Trumps cabinet is almost without fail, every single member made their fortune in entirely parasitic manners. I mean it's most obvious with DeVos, considering how her family made their fortune, but asset strippers and rentiers are the predominant species within cabinet (in addition to career politicians and military figures) rather than, say, inventors or innovators.
You could say the same of most of the power elite in the United States. This is true even among the the Silicon Valley crowd, even though it is sometimes noted as the chief exception to the trend toward "complacency," which run the gamut from obvious and outright fraud (e.g. Theranos) to products like Facebook that succeed mostly because natural monopolies allow them to cannibalize attention, ad revenue, page views and so forth.
Oh I think there's no "even" about it, the Silicon Valley elite are completely parasitic in their use of IP and monopolistic behaviours to enhance their own fortunes.
Thing is Obama's cabinet did contain people like Chu, Moniz, Gina McCarthy, Lisa Jackson etc. You can disagree with their actions in office, but they were people notable for the ideas they held, not the amount of money they had accumulated. The only Devos/Mnuchinesque figure I can think of in Obama's cabinet is Pritzker.
