Various people have expressed concern about the Elon Musk buy of Twitter, on grounds that it is dangerous to have such an important platform controlled by one very wealthy individual. I wonder if these people have noticed..
–One of the two most influential newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, is 100% owned by Jeff Bezos, who last I checked is also pretty well-off financially
–The other most-influential newspaper, The New York Times, has been controlled for decades by one wealthy and prominent family. Although The Times is owned by a publicly-traded corporation, the dual-class stock structure means that the control is with the family, not with the other shareholders.
–The largest social media platform, Meta/Facebook, is about 6 times larger than Twitter, based on market capitalization. Although Meta is a public company, it also has a dual-class stock structure, which gives Zuckerberg effective control with 53% of those Class B shares.
–The platform that seems to be getting the most traction among those under 35 or so is TikTok. It is owned by a Chinese company, which means it is required to do the bidding of the government of that country, which means in effect the CCP.
All of those things appear to be just fine with most of those people who are now expressing their upsetness about Musk/Twitter.
See my related post at Ricochet: Strike a blow for free speech.