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Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

> 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...

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