Alpha bros won in November. Woke is done and bro is on. What’s most interesting in learning to live in bro nation is watching three of the richest men in the world take a knee and kiss the ring of the less rich man who is, nevertheless, the biggest bro in the biggest town in the world. Bro is canine hierarchical.

“Bro” won this time straight up. Four years of woke blew the heads off bro brothers and now we’ll spend our time with what bro has to offer. The three richest men in the world in 2025, Elon Musk at $421 billion, Jeff Bezos at $233 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg at $202 billion, may be one, two and three alpha steps lower than the highest bro, but they have the collective bro-ness to dominate every fire hydrant in the nation.

Musk can’t compete directly with the Alpha of Alphas, but he is setting bro-dom standards for the two next in line. His business role model is General Electric’s former alpha, Jack Welch, who installed the “long hours, high intensity, performance excellence” workplace at GE Musk wants at X. Musk took Welch’s performance policies to Twitter where he canned 80% of his employees, most of whom were there, apparently, to support civility. He then created X. X is now total bro. Musk’s only problem is the Alpha of Alphas has delayed the shutdown of TikTok, X’s ad competitor, so Musk may not recover the billions he spent clipping the chirping bird.

Soon Musk will find out if bro diatribing and long work hours are a winning formula. X has welcomed back alpha barker Nick Fuentes, the farthest of the far-right howlers, who taunted women who voted for Kamala Harris on X with the slogan, “Your body, my choice!” Definitely not woke. The slogan, actually mild in X’s trolling space, has been flung at girls across the country by their male classmates feeling their renewed puppy-bro freedoms.

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Bezos of Amazon and a bro influencer in the media world, especially at the Washington Post, exercised his Jack Welch muscle when he stopped a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and his editor squelched a cartoon satirizing Bezos and other tech titans tithing to Trump’s inauguration fund. He lost thousands of paying customers at the Post resulting in layoffs to balance his budget. Bezos can absorb the losses, but woke reporters and liberal satirists, living on thinner salaries, will feel the pinch.

It’s been a long time since Bezos transformed from scrawny bookseller to muscled cowboy-hatted-and-booted “astronaut” soaring into low orbit in his ultimate masculine symbol. He apparently caught the rocket bug from his high-orbit competitor Musk.

Bezos outflanked Musk with the name of his latest rocket, the New Glenn in honor of Democratic senator and now deceased astronaut John Glenn. The first American astronaut to orbit earth was as different from Musk and Bezos as any man could be. The senator was known for his courage, humility and exemplary character. His pals called him “the clean marine” because he wasn’t the partying kind. He lived his life more like President Jimmy Carter. Glenn’s form of masculine role modeling is clearly not de rigueur in today’s showy Alpha America.

Showing off brings us to the youngest of these alphas. Zuckerberg’s start came at the expense of women students at Harvard with his “hot or not” photo contest. This approach of Ivy men to their female colleagues has a long tradition, with an early version of the “hot or not” catalog at Cornell University in the 1960s known as the “Pig Book.” The reference was to the minority of first-year women on campus.

Zuckerberg’s fabulous insight into the gender hierarchies at Harvard led him to create Facebook. Give him credit for that invention, along with his Harvard classmates who probably thought it up first. In any case, this supercharged Ivy League dropout’s transformation from obnoxious student to obnoxious chief executive of pretentiously named Meta was capsulized in his announcement he will fire 5% of his workforce based on their slacker mentality. Only the 95% of his workers who are, can we guess, “high intensity” will survive the cut.

Zuckerberg’s look is no longer flip flops and hoodie. He’s moved on to all-black jeans and tight tee-shirts to highlight his buffed-and-puffed chest in a poor imitation of Steve Jobs. Following Musk’s lead, he’s dismantling speech oversight at Facebook in the name of speech freedom and anti-wokedom. This change will put him in direct competition with X for the bro-nasty crowd.

So far, bro nation markers are laid-off workers, a jump in inflation and interest rates, a boost to cryptocurrencies and a doubling of the Alpha of Alphas’ wealth based on his Truth Social platform, Trump bible sales and Trump and Melania meme coins.

President Donald Trump’s inauguration featured an inspiring chorale of the Armed Forces Joint Chorus comprising women and men from every ethnic and racial background in a thrilling performance of blended voices resounding in the Capitol’s rotunda. Ironies abound.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.