There's growing concern about what the world's richest man will do with Twitter.
 | By Suein Hwang Business, Economics and Technology Editor, Opinion |
That image is fading. In recent weeks, Musk appeared to side with Beijing in its efforts to control Taiwan. He proposed a plan that would end the war in Ukraine by allowing Russia to annex Ukrainian land — comments that were welcomed by Moscow. He suggested that he could not "indefinitely" fund Starlink, his internet service that has proved crucial to the Ukrainian military. (He backtracked soon after.) |
And now Musk owns Twitter. Policymakers in Washington are looking at him in a very different light, worrying that he is too powerful and too reckless. |
There's irony in that, as so much of Musk's success can be attributed to the U.S. government, says David Nasaw, a historian and author. Nasaw — who has written noted biographies of Andrew Carnegie, Joseph P. Kennedy and William Randolph Hearst — sees many parallels between the robber barons then and Musk, the robber baron of today. Musk and his brethren sought and received from the government "enormous subsidies and protection, while demanding that they be left alone to conduct their business as they pleased," Nasaw writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. |
The key difference, however, is that Musk's command of "media and market dynamics in this era of meme stocks, day trading, instant communications, misinformation and disinformation" makes him potentially more dangerous than the moguls of the industrial era, says Nasaw. Kennedy, the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was a master stock manipulator but "feared that capitalism would never recover from the Great Depression if manipulators and fraudsters were free to do as they pleased. Under Kennedy, the commission outlawed many of the practices that he had exploited to make his fortune." |
He adds that "Musk has no such fears and no such scruples." |
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