Media

Loss Leaders: Tech Barons Buy Up Media Outlets to Hide Grifts

Billionaires are amassing control of our information environment to manipulate and control politics

Photo by Tyler Vosburg

As a young grocery-store clerk, I learned about loss leaders. Cheap chips get customers into the store, where they proceed to overpay for eggs and other basic needs.

I’ve traded stocking shelves for shaping media and tech policy, but I’ve noticed a new kind of loss leader. One that is more opaque and far more dangerous.

The tech-billionaire class is buying up media properties for financial returns that are dubious at best, then bending them to help shape public perception about their more powerful companies. They’re using these properties to curry favor with President Trump, censoring content to appease him and greasing the wheels for regulatory approvals of sketchy deals and big fat government contracts that are obscured from the public eye.

Here’s the scary thing. These folks are so ridiculously wealthy that they need not — and seemingly do not — care about making money off their media investments. Instead, their media acquisitions are more about power, domination, control and creating circumstances where they can hide their own corruption and grifts.

Exhibit A: Elon Musk’s X-periment

Take Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. He paid way over market value and saddled the company with more than $13 billion in debt to buy the platform in 2022. He promptly lost more than half of his advertisers after our #StopToxicTwitter campaign exposed how his reckless leadership resulted in household-brand advertisements showing up next to hate speech. Many of those advertisers never returned because at the rebranded “X,” Musk laid off scores of people responsible for sales, content moderation and brand safety, responded to press questions about his wild antics with automated poop emojis and told advertisers “to go fuck yourself.”

Musk destroyed a platform that once helped organizers mobilize major human- and civil-rights activism from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter. Rampant hate, conspiracy theories, bots, AI slop, pornography, scams and pay-to-play engagement schemes have radically diminished X’s value as a platform for democratic engagement, turning it into a right-wing cesspool that’s grown too stupid and extreme even for some MAGA loyalists.

The X buyout isn’t a mere vanity project for the world’s first trillionaire. It’s a tool for controlling narratives and political actors. Despite the cesspool vibes, prominent politicians, journalists and companies are still active on the site, so Musk’s power has not diminished. With access to every private direct message ever sent on the platform, he has leverage over public figures who use the platform, including Trump.

Meanwhile, Musk’s businesses, notably SpaceX and Tesla, have benefitted from tens of billions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies. To add insult to injury, according to the Economic Policy Institute, Musk’s destructive stint at DOGE allowed him to access personal data and federal contracts that further lined his pockets and “could cost working people billions of dollars.” It also resulted in more than 700,000 people dying due to the dismantling of USAID under DOGE, according to the group that tracked these tragedies. Who answered for these horrors? Certainly not the White House, which has denied that Musk fed government data into his Grok AI, yet failed to articulate how it firewalled him from doing so.

Exhibit B: The expanding Ellison empire

In the past two years, Oracle co-founder and Trump crony Larry Ellison has helped bankroll the expansion of son David’s media empire. Last year, the Ellisons purchased Paramount for $8 billion. To sweeten the deal, Paramount settled a meritless defamation lawsuit with the president for $16 million and cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show when he called the payment a “big fat bribe.” To win the Trump FCC’s approval of the deal, the Ellisons agreed to install a former Trump ambassador as a “bias monitor” at CBS News, gutted diversity programs, eliminated its Race and Culture Unit and repeatedly censored content to keep the president happy. This resulted in a mass exodus of esteemed journalists and news producers, and coincided with a steep decline in ratings on 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings.

If the Ellisons cared about losing money due to poor ratings, you’d think they would adjust — but they’re not, and they won’t. With Oracle, Skydance, Paramount, CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, Showtime, Paramount+, dozens of other media properties, and a giant chunk of TikTok — which Oracle acquired through a deal that Trump helped broker — they’re doubling down. Earlier this week, over Free Press’ objection, a judge approved Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Of course, Warner Bros. is a massive media conglomerate in its own right that includes CNN, HBO, HBO Max and dozens of other media properties in the United States and around the world. The new merged company will now be called Skydance. How original.

Warner Bros. has changed hands several times over the past two decades and all of those transfers have been economic busts.

Yet to top Netflix’s bid for the company, the Ellisons made an excessive offer and agreed to load up with an astonishing amount of debt held by foreign governments to do so. This mega-merger is now a highly leveraged deal that includes a nearly 50 percent stake for Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Paramount is also asking (wait for it) Musk to invest in the deal.

The Trump Justice Department rubber-stamped the merger, but following pressure from the Block the Merger coalition that we helped lead, 12 state attorneys general filed suit to block it. The Ellisons threatened to move Paramount out of California unless the AGs dropped the suit, a stunt that California AG Rob Bonta said amounted to “blackmail.” Yet Bonta ultimately folded under pressure from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, all of whom have current and future political aspirations to finance.

But rising prices and job losses aren’t the only injuries from this merger. The Ellisons promised the president “sweeping changes” at CNN in exchange for government approval, and reportedly said they’ll fire anchors. Indeed, the Ellisons have shown that they will flex their media power to tamp down narratives that challenge rising authoritarianism, corruption and grift. The president has rewarded them handsomely, and not just with merger approvals. Oracle received a $7 billion Department of Defense contract in July, and that’s just a small cut of the billions in taxpayer dollars lining the Ellisons’ pockets. The government, in turn, uses Oracle’s tools to support rogue agencies like ICE that are rife with human-rights abuses.

These are but two of many examples of sketchy billionaires who buy up media outlets to provide cover for their other interests. Jeff Bezos is destroying The Washington Post while pitching Blue Origin to the government. Mark Zuckerberg is exploiting sketchy AI tax loopholes and terminating DEI initiatives at Meta. The list goes on.

Structural reform is the antidote

As millions of people struggle to feed their families, the billionaire class is flexing its grotesque wealth to buy up the means through which people access news and information. They’re using these properties to manipulate how people understand the world around them, to obscure their greed and grift and to execute their political agendas, which include massive concentration of wealth and special favors to the richest people on earth at the expense of the rest of us.

They are willing to cooperate with the government to censor and control the narrative, and bully and buy off government officials who stand in their way. They may not see a direct return on their media investments, but they’re laughing all the way to the bank with their big fat government checks supported by working people’s taxes.

What’s clear is that our laws and our political system are not strong enough to resist the pressure and manipulation of corrupt billionaires. Our political leaders have failed us, yes, but this is about so much more than any one politician. It’s about twin systems — our media system and our political system — that are in desperate need of reform.

This week, as I process the loss in our yearlong fight against the Ellisons’ takeover of Warner Bros., I’m inspired by my Block the Merger partner, Mark Ruffalo. “This was never about just one merger: this was about fighting back against corrupt oligarch billionaires trampling the interests of everyday people to line their own pockets. We’re still in that fight. Join us.”

Free Press is in! We’ll be working with all of the incredible creatives, policy wonks and activists who we’ve met through our Block the Merger campaign. Together we’ll fight for policy solutions that fund and diversify our media and safeguard its independence. We remain steadfast in our mission to uplift the voices of everyday people in policy discussions — and will never allow the outsized voices of a few greedy billionaires to drown out everyone else.

About the author

Jessica J. González is an attorney and co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, where she leads efforts to transform the media system so it can support a just and multiracial democracy. Follow her on Bluesky.

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Compiled by Pressing Issues editors

Signal honors. We are taking a moment from sharing media and tech updates to congratulate Pressing Issues Co-Editor Julio Ricardo Varela and the entire podcast team at American Colony for earning a 2026 Signal Awards Finalist honor as one of this year’s best podcasts. The podcast is a bilingual series that explores how colonialism shapes the everyday lives of Puerto Ricans.