Washington Post columnist Matt Bai had a piece this week in which he implied that people did not realize the enormous political power that Elon Musk would have by taking ownership of a huge social media platform like Twitter.
“Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 is a useful case study here. At the time, the $44 billion impulse buy seemed like an act of petulance and bad business acumen, and by some measures it was; Musk terrorized and fired its employees, vacillated between business models, drove away advertisers and ultimately lost billions.
“In retrospect, though, most of us who laughed at his hubris can see that Musk pulled off something remarkable. Whatever havoc he wreaked on the platform for its users and engineers, Musk created for himself the loudest personal microphone in the country — the modern equivalent of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Musk’s dominance of Twitter took his cultural and political influence to a new level and made it possible for him to become the second-most powerful man in Washington. Not a bad return on investment.”
This is a complete lie. There were people who recognized the power associated with control of these social media platforms, they just were not given a voice in major media outlets like the Washington Post. A rational policy would have involved steps to downsize these platforms. Ownership of a smaller platform would still provide substantial political power, but it would be more comparable to the power associated with a television network or major newspaper. And a diversity of platforms would provide some possibility of balance,
It’s also worth noting that the Section 230 protection we give to Elon Musk means that, unlike print or broadcast outlets, he can freely spread defamatory material about any target of his wrath and face zero legal consequences. If he wants to spread lies to hundreds of millions of people about someone embezzling money or being a pedophile, we give him license to do so.
Whether modifying Section 230 protection is the best route for downsizing X and Facebook is a debatable point, but the fact that these platforms convey enormous political power to those who control them is not. The fact that Matt Bai and his clique were apparently unable to recognize this obvious reality shows their lack of understanding of the world around them.
This failure is reminiscent of the failure of nearly all economists and economic reporters to recognize the housing bubble, the collapse of which led to the Great Recession and the financial crisis. As with the political power of the huge social media platforms, those of us who warned of the bubble were largely denied access to major media outlets. (Paul Krugman was a very important exception.) Just as with Bai’s column, after the collapse the bubble, economic commentators all gave themselves a collective “who could have known?” amnesty.
The story here is a badly failed gatekeeping system for access to major media outlets. Access is overwhelmingly awarded based on connections and credentials, not on the merits of the arguments. The gatekeepers are either unable or unwilling to evaluate whether a particular argument is sensible.
This failure is a big deal and I’m sure it applies in many more areas than the two extreme cases I am mentioning here. (I could also include trade where the failures of the standard account presented in the media should be obvious.) This lack of competence, coupled with lack of accountability, gives the MAGA masses a very legitimate basis for their complaints about elites. Turning over control of the government to an ill-informed power-crazed billionaire is not likely to improve their circumstances, but the Matt Bais of the world, and the gatekeepers that push such lazy thinking forward are big part of what got us to this point.
While I’m on the topic of Matt Bai, let me also correct another point he made in his piece. He seems to be under the impression that Elon Musk has seriously studied the budget before diving in with his DOGE crew.
“My problem with this theory, though, is that you’re talking about a guy who almost single-handedly — and against all prevailing wisdom — built the country’s first successful electric car and then a private space company on which NASA is now dependent. Musk may be a lot of things, but dumb isn’t among them. I find it hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have bothered to familiarize himself with the federal budget before shooting off his mouth. I can see him devouring the entire thing while simultaneously stabbing his way through a swarm of goatmen in “Diablo.””
I don’t know about Elon Musk’s involvement with the goatmen in Diablo, but all the evidence suggests that he has not bothered to familiarize himself with the federal budget or the other economic issues he weighs in on.
He has talked about the federal workforce as though it is both growing rapidly and is directly a major source of waste. Both views are clearly false. Federal employees are a much smaller share of the workforce than they were half a century ago. Their pay accounts for less than 5 percent of the federal budget.
After his DOGE team broke into the government’s payments system, he claimed outrage at the fact that every payment that had been requested had gone through, even when the recipient was a known drug dealer or other type of criminal. Of course, it would have been outrageous if the opposite were the case. We would all be furious if the person processing payments at our bank decided not to have one of our checks go through because they decided they were going to a bad person. Obviously, Elon had not even done the most basic homework on this one.
I’ll mention one more Musk failing just to point out the extent to which he really is clueless about many of the areas where he weighs in. After the January jobs report was released, Musk fumed on Twitter that in the month from December to January, we had created over 1 million jobs for immigrants but just 10,000 jobs for native born workers.
This was an incredibly simple error. Every year, the Census Bureau puts in new population controls into its household survey in January. This can lead to a large break between the December and January data.
It is not necessary to read through long texts on this issue to understand what is involved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics described the impact of the new population controls on page 5 of the January jobs report. Apparently, Musk did not take the few minutes needed to review the report before going off on his nativist tirade to his hundreds of millions of followers.
This incredible sloppiness is important to recognize in order to understand our current situation. We have a greedy power-hungry clueless billionaire, taking advantage of a 78-year-old president suffering from dementia, to ransack the government for his own ends. That’s the truth even if the major media outlets are scared to tell it.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
