For many, the era of US history that most resembles contemporary America is easy to identify: the Gilded Age.

It is, in certain ways, an apt comparison. Like modern America, the Gilded Age saw a small number of men tower over US politics and industry alike. Rising atop a swell of wealth inequality, figures like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller mixed private interests with public policy, opening doors in Washington and beyond with ease. Their model is a clear precedent for figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and more.

Yet the further we get into the 2020s, the more the comparison to the Gilded Age risks obscuring, rather than enlightening, realities in the US. There are parallels, yes. But the current situation in the US now dwarfs even the height of the Gilded Age, both in terms of the total levels of wealth inequality brought to bear, as well as the influence this small cohort of men now have.

Consider the total wealth personally controlled by some of these figures. Rockefeller, the richest of the Gilded Age tycoons, died worth the equivalent of approximately $30bn, adjusted for inflation. Not bad, clearly. But compare that to Musk’s net worth. The Tesla and Starlink chief may no longer technically be a trillionaire, but he’s now worth approximately $950bn – or more than 30 times what Rockefeller was worth.

Of course, the average American is likewise wealthier than their Gilded Age predecessors, even adjusting for inflation, both in nominal terms and purchasing power. So perhaps it’s worth examining instead the rate of total American wealth controlled by the current crop of figures. As the economist Gabriel Zucman calculated last year, the rate of total US household wealth now attached to the richest 0.00001% in the US is more than double what it was towards the end of the Gilded Age – and that was before Donald Trump returned to the White House, accelerating the US’s wealth inequality.

Then again, perhaps it’s not simply about the sheer heights of the finances now controlled by a vanishingly small number of Americans. It’s also about how that money can now be used – which is now far beyond any kind of Gilded Age precedent as well. While it’s true that those original robber barons used much of their wealth to target politicians, developments toward the end of the Gilded Age specifically hemmed in this kind of corporate financing of American campaigns. These efforts culminated with the passage of the Tillman Act, signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907, which specifically barred corporate financing of federal politicians.

Compare that to the current campaign financing landscape in the US. Thanks in large part (but not exclusively) to the Citizens United decision in 2010, US elections remain as open as they’ve ever been to deep-pocketed donors. Figures like Musk alone have been able to offload hundreds of millions of dollars in pursuit of his own political and financial aims – far beyond anything Rockefeller and his cohort ever dreamed.

There’s one other key difference that places this current era beyond even the Gilded Age: the explosion of offshore and financial secrecy tools available at a moment’s notice. Thanks to the proliferation of everything from anonymous shell companies to perpetual trusts, these wealthiest forces can now mask their riches from any investigators, regulators, journalists and others – and entrench the kind of aristocracy Americans have long chafed against. Indeed, the combination of collapsing campaign finance regulations and anonymous financial tools led to nearly $2bn in dark, untraceable funds swirling around the US’s most recent election – a reality that even those during the Gilded Age would wonder at.

There are more distinctions of contemporary America from its Gilded Age predecessor, from the staggering self-enrichment of the current administration to the open availability of all these tools to foreign actors also seeking to influence US policy. But the scope, scale, speed and sheer ease with which wealthy figures can grow, protect and unleash their wealth – and the implications for the future of US democracy – now set this era apart from anything previous. And this isn’t even considering the ideological shifts seen within the current crop of America’s wealthiest; where previous figures like Carnegie or Vanderbilt at least seeded universities and libraries, we now have, as Dartmouth’s Brooke Harrington noted, “noblesse without the oblige”.

Contemporary America, then, is not a redux of the Gilded Age. It is instead something else: the Age of Oligarchy. And if those wealthy figures would have their way, it’s an era that’s only just beginning.

• Casey Michel is the author of United States of Oligarchy and a senior nonresident fellow on corruption at the Center for International Policy