For more than a year, a small underground collective has been quietly doing something that would once have been unthinkable in mainstream political activism: building detailed dossiers on some of the most powerful people on Earth. Their plan, announced this month, is to begin openly doxing billionaires as part of a phased campaign against what they call the American oligarchy. The first release, they say, will map the homes of Elon Musk, his brother Kimbal, and the members of Tesla’s board, along with the investors and suppliers who help keep the corporation alive. In a press release issued Monday, the group promises far more than a few names and addresses: more than 150 home addresses, most of them previously unreported; more than 3,500 records on people with a combined wealth of about $1.4 trillion; and reporting on what they allege are “criminal exploits and security lapses” of the ultra-wealthy. The group calls itself Capytistas—a playful, deadpan riff on Zapatistas, the Indigenous insurgents of southern Mexico—and it has adopted the capybara, a famously placid rodent that gets along with nearly every other animal, as its mascot. The capybara emerged as a secret rival to the Shiba Inu, the Doge meme Musk used to brand his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and the rodent has since become a sly symbol of resistance for a loose network of activists, researchers, and ordinary people who believe that concentrated wealth and political power have become an existential threat to democracy.
Two members of the group, interviewed by WIRED on the condition of anonymity, say they spent the past year assembling detailed files on billionaires and their inner circles. Their sources and methods are not entirely legal, and they acknowledge that freely: they used nearly every technique available to a private investigator, and some that are not. They described themselves as part of an international network that includes grassroots organizers, professional researchers, former journalists, and artists, some of whom received top honors in print, television, and digital media in their former careers. For security, most of the work happens in silos: people who contribute data often do not know one another’s names. The group says it has raised more than $1.2 million from what they call “a heartening number of wealthy class traitors”—people rich enough that they could just as easily be targets, but who instead share the view that extreme concentrations of wealth and political influence are tearing American society apart. The members interviewed by WIRED did not seem like thrill-seekers. They spoke in careful, measured terms, aware that what they are doing could lead to lawsuits, criminal charges, or something worse. They described themselves not as radical extremists but as ordinary people who have watched the gap between the powerful and the powerless widen for decades, and who decided that the usual tools of civic engagement—protests, petitions, journalism, elections—have not been enough to slow the rise of a ruling class that answers to no one.
The scale of what the Capytistas are threatening to release is hard to grasp. More than 3,500 records on people with a combined net worth of roughly $1.4 trillion would amount to one of the largest leaks of private information about the super-rich ever assembled. The group says the dossiers include not just home addresses but details about family members, business associates, legal trouble, and what they call security lapses—information that could be used by anyone from investigative journalists to stalkers to intelligence services. Doxing, the practice of publishing private or identifying information about individuals, has become a favored weapon in political warfare across the ideological spectrum. In March 2025, as protesters gathered outside Tesla dealerships, an anonymous site called DOGEQuest posted what it claimed were the addresses of Tesla owners and DOGE staff. Later that year, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified that his unit drew more than three-quarters of its deportation referrals from Canary Mission—a website with similarly unknown funding but radically different goals: building dossiers on pro-Palestinian students and professors. The Capytistas are not the first to use doxing as a political tool, and they will not be the last. The question is whether targeting the very wealthy—people who have enormous power over jobs, housing, media, and the state itself—should be viewed differently from targeting ordinary citizens, and whether publishing their home addresses is an act of transparency or an invitation to violence.
The political moment the Capytistas are responding to has been building for years, but it crystallized in January 2025, when President Joe Biden used his farewell address to warn that an “oligarchy is taking shape in America.” Biden did not name Elon Musk, but he did not need to. Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, held an unpaid job as a special government employee for much of 2025 and poured more than $700 million into federal elections since 2023—the equivalent of roughly 15 million typical online donations. That combination of extreme wealth, direct access to the levers of government, and open contempt for the democratic process is exactly what the word “oligarch” was meant to describe. Americans have long used the term to refer almost exclusively to Russian tycoons who carved up state industries after the Soviet collapse, but it has now entered mainstream American politics in a way that feels impossible to reverse. The Capytistas argue that Musk is simply the most visible example of a broader pattern: billionaires who finance political candidates, run government agencies, own the platforms on which public discourse takes place, and use their fortunes to make sure that the legal and regulatory systems work for them. The group’s founders say they are not interested in terrorizing wealthy people or their families; they say they are trying to expose the architecture of power that keeps ordinary citizens from understanding how decisions are made and who really benefits.
The choice of the capybara as a mask is no accident. The capybara is not a predator; it is a large, mild-mannered rodent that has become an internet icon for calm and indifference. It gets along with birds, monkeys, and even crocodiles. In the early days of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, when the Doge meme—a Shiba Inu with a sideways glance—was being used to brand the agency as a tech-bro joke, the capybara began circulating among internet users as a quiet alternative, a sort of anti-Doge. The meme has since been reclaimed by pro-Ukrainian activists who post as cartoon dogs to mock Russian propaganda and raise money for the war, but the Capytistas kept the rodent as their symbol. There is something deliberately unthreatening about the image, which makes the group’s actual plans all the more striking. They are not threatening violence. They are not calling for protests or boycotts. They are simply promising to tell the truth about where the billionaires live, how they travel, and what kinds of secrets they keep. The group’s style—anonymous, meticulous, and darkly humorous—owes more to watchdog journalism and corporate infiltration than to street protest. They want to be seen not as terrorists but as auditors, and they want the rest of us to understand that the super-rich have been doing something far more damaging than buying a few politicians: they have been shaping the rules of American life so that everyone else plays on a tilted field.
What will happen after the Capytistas publish their first round of addresses is unclear. Some states and cities have laws against doxing, and a coordinated release of private information is almost certain to draw legal action from Musk and others. Tech companies, too, may be forced to decide whether hosting the dossiers violates their terms of service or their obligations to user privacy. But the group says it is prepared for that, with multiple platforms and networks designed to keep the information alive even if the original sources are taken down. They also know that their claim to be acting in the public interest will be met with skepticism, especially from those who point out that doxing, no matter how noble the motive, can quickly spiral into harassment and violence. There is no guarantee that the people reading the Capytistas’ files will use the information carefully, and no guarantee that the group itself can maintain its discipline as it grows. The one thing that seems certain is that the campaign will not be a single event. The group describes it as phased, beginning with Tesla-related targets and expanding to include more than 150 homes, 3,500 records, and a broad range of billionaires and their top lieutenants. For the Capytistas, this is not a stunt; it is the beginning of a longer effort to confront what they see as a fundamental crisis of accountability. They believe that concentrated wealth has become a form of violence against the public, and that the only way to fight it is to turn the tools of surveillance and exposure back on those who have wielded them for so long. Whether they will be remembered as defenders of democracy or as dangerous vigilantes depends on what happens in the months ahead—and on what the rest of us decide to do with the information they are about to place in our hands.
