They still rule our world
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, attacked a publication owned by the world’s third richest man, Jeff Bezos, last month for reprinting a column published by the world’s 13th richest man, Mike Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg opinion article, posted by The Washington Post, asked whether Musk’s recent investment in Twitter would endanger freedom of speech. “WaPo always good for a laugh,” Musk wrote in a tweet, with smiling and crying emoji.
The jab underscored an unusual and consequential feature of the nation’s new digital public square: Technological change and the fortunes it created have given a vanishingly small club of massively wealthy individuals the ability to play arbiter, moderator and bankroller of not only the information that feeds the nation’s discourse but also the architecture that undergirds it.Advertisement
The information that courses over these networks is increasingly produced by publications controlled by fellow billionaires and other wealthy dynasties, who have filled the void of the collapsing profit-making journalism market with varying combinations of self-interest and altruism. It is a situation that has alarmed policy experts at both ends of the increasingly vicious ideological and partisan divides.
“This is almost becoming like junior high school for billionaires,” Brookings scholar Darrell M. West said of the new information magnates. “The issue is we are now very dependent on the personal whims of rich people, and there are very few checks and balances on them. They could lead us in a liberal, conservative or libertarian direction, and there is very little we can do about that.”
Read the whole thing if you can. It talks about Murdoch and Bloomberg and Gates and other billionaires who have a lot of interest in the information sphere and have put their money behind it. And it points out there are also people like Peter Thiel who are backing GOP candidates and bankrolling lawsuits to punish and destroy outlets they don’t approve of such as the one that took down Gawker.
Of course, rich people have always owned media in this country going all the way back to the beginning. There’s nothing new there. But the ability of social media to transmit disinformation and misinformation instantly to vast numbers of people seem to make it even more pernicious that these few rich, white men pretty much control the whole ecosystem.
And some of these boy billionaires really are immature assholes, Musk leading the pack:
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) posted a tweet Friday criticizing when “some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it,” Musk responded by suggesting the congresswoman had a romantic interest in him.
“Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy,” he tweeted.
Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok.”
He seems like a guy with some issues.