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APRIL 26, 2022
Cooper on TAP
Elon Musk, American Oligarch
It's a billionaire's world, everyone else just lives here.
Elon Musk, for the moment the world's richest person, bought Twitter
this week seemingly on a whim for a cool $44 billion
, or
roughly the GDP of Estonia
.
It's a lot of money, but the deal is funded about half by debt, and so
won't even put much of a dent in his $290 billion fortune
.
It's alarming news.
As Max Read writes
,
Twitter has become a de facto public square for most of the planet.
Virtually every politician and government department outside of China
has an account on there-and unlike Facebook, which increasingly serves
as a bot-infested holding pen for your most deranged elderly relatives,
Twitter has tremendous influence outside the platform. Journalists,
think tankers, celebrities, and other bigwigs are on there all the time.
I doubt Donald Trump would have become president without it.
Personally, despite Twitter being very helpful in my career, I'm not
thrilled about a private company being such a central artery of global
communications. But there is no denying that it is so important, and at
least the reign of the previous airhead hippie
overlord had the virtue of semi-benign neglect.
The fact that one person can liquidate a modest proportion of his net
wealth-roughly equivalent to a middle-class person putting a down
payment on a house in Cincinnati-and just seize control of this
immensely powerful system is incredibly alarming. I suspect Musk won't
change much, because Twitter as it exists has been extremely useful to
him, but there's nothing stopping him from making any changes he wants
(outside of a union drive, possibly). Worse, there's no telling what
kind of data he now has at his fingertips-imagine what might be found
in the direct messages of politicians or celebrities? The 2016 campaign
showed the power of compromising personal material dribbled out over
months.
It's all the more striking given Musk's ludicrously inflated wealth
figure. The valuation of Tesla-the overwhelming majority of his
money-is consistently over $1 trillion (though it did slip below the
mark
on Tuesday). Its market capitalization is greater than the next nine
most valuable automakers put together
,
despite the fact that it sells less than a tenth
as many cars as Toyota alone
,
and continuing its current of super-rapid sales growth looks very
unlikely
given competition and commodity shortages.
The American status quo of low-to-nonexistent taxes on billionaires,
slapdash financial regulation, and lax corporate regulation means we are
all at the mercy of a handful of random ultra-rich oligarchs with the
resources of entire nations at their fingertips. That kind of
concentrated power makes a mockery of democracy.
~ RYAN COOPER
Follow Ryan Cooper on Twitter
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Free Idea for Moderate Democrats: Criticize Republicans
Conservative positions on abortion and LGBT rights are astoundingly
unpopular. It could be better sledding for moderates than condemning
their own party. BY RYAN COOPER
Will Inflation Break the News?
The greatest threat to democracy from media isn't disinformation,
it's the paywall. BY DAVID DAYEN
Fossil Fuel Allies in Congress Stand With Embattled Rep. Henry Cuellar
Cuellar, who has the worst environmental voting record of any Democrat
in Congress, faces a competitive primary challenge from Green New Deal
backer Jessica Cisneros. BY DONALD SHAW
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