Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has rested on two very different sources of financial support. The first has been well documented: the million or so small donors who gave less than £100 each, largely through Obama’s peerless website and social networking efforts.

The second is less well known, but far more significant in terms of his future administration. These are the financiers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who perceive in him not only a likely winner, from an investment perspective, but also a man whose rise and ideology-lite politics closely mirror their own. They include men like Ken Griffin, the baby-faced, 40-year-old billionaire who runs Citadel Investment Group, one of the largest hedge funds in the US.

Griffin is one of those profiting from America’s financial ailments by buying up distressed debt – of which there is a great deal at the moment. But he is also a fierce critic of traditional Wall Street, accusing it of “dropping the ball” and causing a mess that is rebounding on all of America. He should be an ideal candidate for an Obama-era Treasury secretary.

In California, Obama has the support of Tim Draper, one of the most colourful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who made his fortune from products such as Hotmail and Skype. Until this election, Draper was a Republican. Not any more. And Obama also has the backing of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalist, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who made his billions from Amazon, Sun Microsystems and Google.

Doerr’s business partner is Al Gore and the two invest heavily in green tech – not for crunchy, ideological reasons but, as Doerr puts it, because “we are raging capitalists”.

The younger generation of entrepreneurs are climbing aboard, too. One of the key members of Obama’s team is Chris Hughes, a 24-year-old who co-founded Facebook and stands to make tens of millions when the company goes public. He has put Obama’s campaign on the cutting edge of online social networks, organisation and fundraising. One of the common threads between these men – Griffin, Draper, Doerr and Hughes – is that, like Obama, they all attended Harvard. Not so long ago, wealthy liberals stuck to their enclaves in Beverly Hills and Manhattan.

But now it seems that Obama has tapped into something quite new: a younger generation of the insanely rich and highly networked, whose wealth is not turning them into conservatives. The old maxim that if a man is not a socialist by 20, he has no heart, and if he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain, seems not to apply to those who have achieved lottery-winner wealth by their mid-thirties.

From observing them at close range during my time at Harvard Business School between 2004 and 2006, I can say that their political views are not framed by years of financial struggle but by the extraordinary privilege and opportunity granted them by sudden riches.

They have not built wealth, dollar by hard-earned dollar, but – as a result of the internet and financial boom – they have seen it rain down on them. The truth is that this new, young financial elite didn’t talk about politics much and when they did, it was largely in an opportunistic way.

Political discussions were almost taboo on campus. It was through business, and perhaps by bringing business practices to foundations and political organisations, that students discovered politics. I remember running into a friend who had worked for a US senator early in her career and asking if she would be watching the results of the 2004 presidential election. No, she said. They were immaterial to her life.

Despite this general apathy, there was a surprising number of members of the business school’s Democratic Club who piled out in force to hear Warren Buffett, the great investor, give a talk.

Buffett argued that the case for being a Democrat came down to what he called the “ovarian lottery”. He asked the audience to imagine that they were just about to be born and to think about how they would arrange the world if it could be however they liked.

His only caveat was that they weren’t to know where, or in what condition, they would be born.What if you were to be born disabled in Darfur– how would you want the world organised? Republicans, he said, arranged the world for themselves. His argument was that being a Democrat was about social justice and fairness. The key to Obama’s popularity among the financial and technological elite may be their age.

Perhaps at no time in US history has there existed such a rich, young, self-made elite. They don’t see themselves reflected in John McCain and his old-school, war-hero values but they recognise a lot of themselves in the globetrotting, BlackBerry-addicted, basketball-playing Obama.

They see a man who has risen almost noiselessly through the political ranks, smooth and unaffiliated, with a powerful educational background (Harvard Law School) and stellar network of friends.

In that sense, his is the perfect contemporary career, which is based not on joining a big firm and scrambling your way up but rather on developing a network of contacts, building a personal brand and exploiting them to your own advantage – regardless of any assumed rules of conduct. In this new elite, you do not wait for permission to start your hedge fund or technology firm, you do it – just as Obama didn’t defer to Hillary Clinton’s assumption that the Democratic nomination was hers by seniority.

The ideal nursery for a great American career these days seems to be the Harvard dormitory room.

It was here that Griffin began trading bonds as an undergraduate. And here that Facebook was founded just a few years ago. And, of course, it was at Harvard Law School that Obama first put himself on the map as a star student.

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism , by Philip Delves Broughton, is published by Viking on Thursday

Andrew Sullivan is away

Times Recommends

• It’s only Brits who don’t appreciate me, says Blair
• Party’s over for Greek graspers
• White House tightens security for Xmas marathon