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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Same reason Bezos owns the Washing ton Post.

If you don’t care about directly making money, you can treat the platform as a way to promote or reject whatever messaging you want to millions of users.

If it’s a public company, it’d be subject to the will of the shareholders and have other corporate responsibilities. If it’s private, it can do whatever he wants it.

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A private corporation is bad because its owner can use it to promote their own personal views. OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth, it will eventually need to engage in anti-societal behavior (dangerous algorithms, dark patterns, lobbying, fines as cost-of-doing-business, union-busting, etc). [Is this late-stage capitalism?](butterfly_meme.jpg) Where do we even go from here?

I think the best option is to back the right oligarch or, if one can't find an acceptable one, become a better oligarch.

Blue Sky

> OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth,

There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.

Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.

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