It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse.
If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, or something open source. When Zuckerberg or Musk became greedy immoral bastards, they started to shape the information fed to the world. You can decide not to buy a Tesla, but you cannot escape the results of brainwashing of other people that vote.
Bill Gates had serious trouble for including a free Internet Browser in his Operating System, because he was not able to influence the public discourse. The new internet mass communication companies do. Google never really got into much trouble while their monopoly was stronger.
Edit: We do not want our platforms to be owned by someone like Susan Wojcicki who inflated her own importance and who thought mass censorship is ok (Google has really abrogated their responsibility here)
Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.
You know what else isn't "Kool-Aid"? The FBI was having monthly and even weekly meetings with Twitter executives to coordinate their efforts. Twitter under Dorsey did this in conjunction with the DHS, the DOJ, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, and the NSA.
In Twitter’s interactions with the FBI, former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth considered the Bureau a proxy for the entire “intelligence community” as a whole; and that the FBI and Twitter have become closely enmeshed.
If you don't think that's a problem for freedom of speech and privacy, perhaps you ought to read up on the topic.
But the US simply stopped fighting against tech monopolies at a given point. And started mocking the EU for doing what was common for the US until recently.
That's not her role. You should be policing the obvious stuff but not that, especially when none of it turns out to be misinformation. She absolutely abrogated her responsibility as CEO or even just being a decent person
Two separate things.
People forget that the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. Bill Gates invested heavily in media and lobbying in the late 90s / early 00s.
This idea is very parochial and American, and it's unfortunate in spreading a wrong idea that gives license for some people to behave as hooligans.
There are massive global companies most of us have never heard of, with CEOs who shun publicity and operate in what is really a mild-mannered but highly competent fashion.
Power also comes from politeness, tact, diplomacy, and the earned attachment of subordinates we call "respect".
They are not constantly immersed in scandal and drama because most of the employees never have much cause to interact negatively.
The cult of US Tech leaders is a vile and embarrassing spectacle of vanity, tantrums, acting-out, histrionics and arrogance. It's very poor human behaviour that harms the perception of business in the wider world, and we should not hold it up as normative.
So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).
This is nonsense. Plenty of good people are wildly successful. The difference is they aren’t addicted to the role, and so see a future for themselves beyond it. Connecting with that future self, in turn, effects their decisions today—at work, at home, in society.
We have a cadre of sociopaths leading our commercial giants. That is a fixable problem. Saying it’s a non-story is just being nihilistic and lazy.
It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.
Boards have plenty of things they're properly responsible for. CEO sociopathy isn't one of them, especially not if it's the profitable type of assholery. The regulation has to come from outside.
You limit their power. Musk has broken important rules and gotten away with it. Stop doing that. Zuckerberg and Facebook, meanwhile, should have been fined back into the single-digit billionaire category for the terror they’ve unleashed on our children.