oligarch

A member of an oligarchy; someone who is part of a small group that runs a country.

• In thus ruling the issue out of court, Lenin implied that there was no problem about the relationship between a class and a party, or a party and its leaders, and that government by a handful of oligarchs can properly be called government b

A very wealthy business owner who wields political power.

• Millions of people were starving, while the oligarchs and their supporters were surfeiting on the surplus.
• Ukraine's oligarchs emerged in parallel to Russia's, who have been more closely studied, and they were quite similar.

A protoplanet formed during oligarchic accretion.

• In the inner Solar System, only the asteroid Ceres was able to grow fast enough to become a dwarf planet, but in the outer Solar System huge numbers of icy bodies formed, ranging from pebbles to the oligarchs now recognized as dwarf planets