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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

As much as I don’t like WaPo’s Opinion columns and Twitter’s double standards in content moderation, I don’t think the two companies are puppets of their owners. The staff there have their mostly left-leaning political view point and their own moral standard. I don’t necessarily agree with their view, but it’s their view and their voice nonetheless.

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What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it's out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn't about making money.

This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).

They probably own them for a lot of reasons: WaPo was failing and running a loss at the time that Bezos purchased it. Twitter is in the same boat due to poor management; it's losing money and headed towards failure. If Musk can turn it around he can A) Make a bunch of money, B) Save a useful tool for online communications and C) Promote his values when hiring leaders at the company.

I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.

"They probably own them for a lot of reasons"

"I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet"

why even post this?

> Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet

Why do you think he's doing neuralink eh? Wake up sheeple!

not every even but he’s definitely going to obliterate the account of that kid that was tracking his private jet.

Buying a media outlet is like buying the yacht and buying the plane. It's like just something of the "everyone in the club has one!" types of stuff you buy when you have enough capital to run your own private country.

> What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies?

Billionaires own companies. That's what they do.

To expand on this, billionaires never park any significant fraction of their positive net worth in cash. Inflation rates alone make that a losing proposition.

So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.

You completely missed the context of my comment. This was a discussion specifically about the acquisition of media companies unrelated to the businesses which create billionaires' wealth.

Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.

https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1514696106223022088?s...

Musk might feel that the monocular political views of the SV C-suite class is bad for his adopted country.

I disagree entirely with your assertion.

I realized that "left-leaning" is an inaccurate characterization. To me being left means being liberal. To quote wikipedia, "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. " And I subscribe to liberalism.

Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.

Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.

Historically, "liberal" encompassed markets. I.e., historically, "liberalism" encompassed capitalism (in the sense of being mostly free to trade one's labor for others' goods and services). "Left-leaning" thinking is generally very suspicious of, if not outright opposed to, capitalism, and in that sense "left-leaning" is very illiberal. The meanings of these terms have shifted somewhat over time, so to equate "left-leaning" and "liberal" isn't wrong at all.

One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".

A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.

Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.

Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!

Your definition of capitalism is actually compatible with left-libertarianism, in the original sense of the word not Rothbard's, market socialism and other forms of left-anarchism and socialism. The only difference compared to your definition are the views on capital, which could be generalized as saying that those who mix their labor with capital should have democratic decision making with regard to that capital.

This is quite a rant and quite a lumping of diverse and unrelated opinions. You have quite a chip on your shoulder.

Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.

Wapo is a smartly used puppet - if the bias was overt it wouldn't be effective.

The bias of the Wapo seems pretty obvious to a lot of people.

So you are saying that it's a coincidence that WaPo, owned by Bezos, who was in a public fued with Bernie Sanders, ran 16 hit pieces on Sanders in less than a day?

https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

Wow, I didn't know that. By the way, the first piece in the article is titled "Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals". This curiously contradicts to Dem's narrative in the past two years that our criminal laws are too harsh and too racist and we should drive more leniency.

That’s because they only hire staff who have the opinions that the people who own the organization want them to have. There’s nothing left-leaning about corporate censorship, which Twitter embodies. It’s all neoconservative war propaganda.

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