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Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

> This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media.

What mega corporation is the Washington Post part of?

Jeff Bezos himself could be considered a mega-corporation.

We're at the point where the personal wealth of oligarchs such as him has begun eclipsing the wealth of all but the very largest corporations. His own personal wealth would rank him somewhere around 60th on the Fortune 500.

It puts him in the top half of countries, just below Croatia, by national net wealth.

Amazon, yes?

I think people struggle with the fact that it's not a legally so. However, per the article, Bezos is exerting power over WP because Amazon lost contracts to Microsoft (due to WP being critical of Trump). Their balance sheets may not be aligned, but their interests are.

And if Bezos toes the line and does things that Trump likes, then Amazon may benefit.

Trump sees "friends" and "enemies" [0], and doesn't care about actual ownership of shares. "Bezos is a friend and sorted out that WaPo mess, so I'll cut him some slack and kill off that Amazon anti-trust thing" is something we can all picture Trump saying.

[0] Obviously I have no idea what he actually sees or thinks, but this picture seems to match his public pronouncements.

Bezos fully owns WaPo personally. It is not under Amazon

Apparently there are a lot of people confused about this, but no, Amazon does not have ownership over the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos bought it with his own personal funds using an LLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post

And surely there is no relation between Bezos and Amazon so the part about "This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media" is obviously false.

It is literally false in this case, yes. The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.

This is a practically useless distinction.

But a pedantically, technically accurate one, just on brand for this site!

The distinction is not wholly useless, since it provides a frame whereby we can interpret this as evidence that the corporate veil is fictive, and that the "evil corporation" problem is actually caused by evil individuals.

My instinct is that Evil Man theory is as simplistic (and wrong) as Great Man theory: there's probably some better explanation that this also provides evidence for, that I'm missing.

Some control?

> The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.

And I'm sure Jeff Bezos is so pure he'd never use his power over WaPo to help Amazon!/s

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