The world’s richest man now owns one of the world’s most important communication platforms. Last month, after a tumultuous and protracted legal drama, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally acquired Twitter for $44 billion.
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, politicians and media pundits have largely focused on the immediate changes that the billionaire has made to the platform — among other things, firing top executives, forewarning workers about an “extremely hardcore” work culture and changing the verification process — and how the move will impact the larger, ongoing debate around free speech.
But Musk’s buyout should also draw attention to something equally, if not more, critical: the unchecked growth of billionaire wealth and power in America today.
The fact that one single person, Elon Musk, could access enough money to buy out an entire social media platform is incredible. It would take the median American worker, working full time at $55,640 a year, no fewer than 790,797 years to make the $44 billion needed to buy Twitter. This is longer than human beings have been on the planet.
I went to the same elementary school, PS-197, and the same high school, James Madison, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did, and I learned the same lessons he did about extreme inequality. But Musk’s Twitter buyout is about more than just billionaire wealth. It’s about billionaire power — or, more specifically, how billionaires use their wealth to buy power and control the ways in which we conduct our private and public lives.
Musk’s takeover of Twitter will affect millions of people both here at home and around the globe. The platform has no fewer than 450 million monthly active users and is one of the world’s most popular communication mediums. Other expected changes that Musk could make to Twitter — most notably, lifting the account suspensions of former President Trump and other high-profile, right-wing figures — will have huge ramifications in the age of misinformation.
But Musk is not the only billionaire using his wealth in ways that greatly impact how our society is run.
Bill Gates used his billions to fund COVID-19 vaccine development efforts, which gave him an outsized say in vaccination strategies that affected the entire planet. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, which undoubtedly give both the power to have an enormous say in the messaging strategies of these media companies. Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger donated $200 million for the construction of a dorm at the University of California, Santa Barbara on the condition that he designed it, resulting in a hostile, windowless plan that prompted widespread outrage and the resignation of an architect on the project.
Billionaires certainly use their wealth to purchase private power in these ways but, critically, they also use it to purchase public power. Since the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision, billionaires have come to dominate the campaign finance scene in America to an astounding degree. They spent a whopping $881 million in this year’s midterm elections — 44 percent more than they did in the last midterm cycle in 2018. In the 2020 elections, billionaires contributed almost 1 out of every 10 dollars received by federal campaigns, with the top 20 combined spending over $2.3 billion, or more than twice as much as the entire Biden campaign.
Their political investments have certainly paid off, as public policy outcomes have come to almost exclusively reflect the interests and preferences of wealthy Americans. We can see this in many different policy areas, but nowhere more so than in the tax code. Today, billionaires pay much lower effective tax rates than everyday Americans who work for a living. Between 2014 and 2018, the richest 25 billionaires paid an average effective tax rate of just 3.4 percent on over $400 billion in gains while the average American pays 13.3 percent. And if that wasn’t enough, billionaires can, incredibly, sometimes get away with paying nothing at all in taxes, like Elon Musk did in 2018.
Unchecked billionaire wealth and power is a veritable crisis facing America today. It is unhealthy to live in a society where a few billionaires like Musk dictate how we go about living virtually every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Change needs to happen, and it needs to happen fast.
As of now, the best path forward to solving this crisis lies in taxing the rich. We certainly need to reform our campaign finance system to dilute the influence of big money, and we also need to safeguard our private institutions from being overwhelmed by billionaires’ voices and demands. At the very least, however, we need to take steps to strip billionaires of the resources — i.e. their extreme wealth — that enable their power in the first place by taxing them more.
Howard Klein is the former president of Reprise Records. He is a cofounder of Blue America PAC and a member of the Patriotic Millionaires.