[thrance]

The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.

[UncleMeat]

Yep.

One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.

Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.

[LarsDu88]

Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.

Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.

Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.

The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.

[UncleMeat]

This is true to a large degree.

I think the bigger change is that wealth is continuing to concentrate. The more wealth accrues under a few hands the more these people are able to exploit disproportionate control over the information environment.