{"id":126812,"date":"2022-04-23T18:52:32","date_gmt":"2022-04-23T18:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?p=126812"},"modified":"2022-04-23T18:52:32","modified_gmt":"2022-04-23T18:52:32","slug":"liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of ‘the gilded age’"},"content":{"rendered":"

OPINION:<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we forget about inflation briefly (surely we deserve a break for the long weekend), thenElon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover is the most interesting business story in the world to me right<\/span> now.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think Musk is the most interesting character in the business world. But I hope he doesn’t get Twitter.<\/p>\n

Putting aside moral issues around his extraordinary wealth (around US$270 billion), there’s a moral hazard in allowing individuals to have total control of media companies – social or traditional.<\/p>\n

At a time when trust in government is low, multi-billionaires like Musk are wielding more power than ever.<\/p>\n

Barely a day goes by when Musk doesn’t generate a global headline.<\/p>\n

Since I started writing this column he’s made fresh headlines, revealing he doesn’t own a home and spends his days staying with friends around the San Francisco area.<\/p>\n

The world’s richest man simply doesn’t have time for property it seems, he’s too busy working, making things happen, re-shaping reality.<\/p>\n

That is what makes Musk more interesting than just the number of zeros on his balance sheet.<\/p>\n

Musk is fascinated by the future and has both the scale and ambition to shape it.<\/p>\n

And he is shaping it in myriad ways, not all of them good.<\/p>\n

It’s probably the moral ambiguity that makes the Musk show so compelling.<\/p>\n

The guy is one lab accident away from becoming a comic book superhero. Or supervillain.<\/p>\n

It could go either way<\/p>\n

Musk doesn’t fit standard definitions of conservative or liberal.<\/p>\n

He’s the guy that turbocharged electric cars with Tesla and made it viable to imagine a world without petrol-powered transport. Tesla is now the fastest-growing car company in the world.<\/p>\n

He’s passionate about green technology. Tesla has big plans for solar power. He’s also throwing money at a weird rapid-transit system of high-speed underground tubes.<\/p>\n

Musk wants to be cool. He smokes pot and has good taste in music.<\/p>\n

He dated uber-cool pop star Grimes.<\/p>\n

But he also has a distinctly libertarian streak that puts him onside with some of the most right-wing groups in the US.<\/p>\n

His views on free-speech have Donald Trump supporters cheering on his Twitter takeover plans.<\/p>\n

They believe he’ll let Trump and other right-wing voices back on the site, giving them a crucial leg-up in the battle to take back control of the White House.<\/p>\n

Musk is obsessed with cryptocurrency, which sits well with libertarian notions of shaking off government control over society.<\/p>\n

He’s warned about the threat artificial intelligence is to humanity but he’s invested heavily in Neuralink – a company working to plug computers directly into our brains.<\/p>\n

Why he needs Twitter isn’t clear. It isn’t the money, so we have to assume it is for the influence.<\/p>\n

When it comes to Twitter, I’m biased. Like a lot of journalists, I spend far too much time on the site.<\/p>\n

I’m invested. Not in a financial sense. I haven’t given a single dollar to Twitter, just countless hours of what media execs like to call engagement.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Twitter is a profitable enterprise – but not hugely by the standards of its tech-boom peers.<\/p>\n

Musk thinks he can make it more profitable.<\/p>\n

But the way he’s gone about the takeover, with a steady streaming of mocking and slightly juvenile tweets, has done little for his credibility as a serious market player.<\/p>\n

Still, the Twitter board was concerned enough to invoke something called a “poison pill” – issuing shares to dilute shareholdings and make the takeover more difficult.<\/p>\n

The experts say Musk’s best next move is something called a “tender” where he makes his offer directly to all shareholders.<\/p>\n

He’s clearly considering it because he keeps tweeting song lyrics like Love me Tender and Tender is the night.<\/p>\n

The whole play for control comes across as an indulgence. A game Musk is playing to amuse himself and from which he can walk away with no consequences.<\/p>\n

That highlights the problem of billionaires treating society like a giant playground.<\/p>\n

Musk’s rise suggests a return to the “gilded age” where billionaires and powerful individuals dictated the terms by which people lived.<\/p>\n

In the past 20 years, technological change has accelerated faster than we’ve seen since the late 19th century – when electricity and combustion engines changed the world.<\/p>\n

Those who’ve been at the forefront of the revolution have grown extraordinarily rich.<\/p>\n

The likes of Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Alphabet’s Larry Page are so rich they rival the so-called “robber barons” of the original 19th-century gilded age – JD Rockefeller, JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie.<\/p>\n

These men were also celebrated as philanthropists while they exerted their power influence to undermine government.<\/p>\n

At his peak, JD Rockefeller was worth an estimated US$450 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, almost twice Musk’s worth.<\/p>\n

The gilded age was so dubbed by satirist Mark Twain to suggest a cheap knock-off of a proper golden age.<\/p>\n

He was right to be cynical. It was a terrible time for workers and led the world into the epic market crash of 1929.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we should be heartened that America has been here before and self-corrected.<\/p>\n

But it took the Great Depression to re-establish public trust in government.<\/p>\n

Musk is adventurous and rebellious. Traits that are innately charismatic. There’s a lot to like.<\/p>\n

He’s never boring but in a world where history is already accelerating at a dangerous pace, that could be the problem.<\/p>\n

Source: Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OPINION: If we forget about inflation briefly (surely we deserve a break for the long weekend), thenElon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover is the most interesting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":126811,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nLiam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"OPINION: If we forget about inflation briefly (surely we deserve a break for the long weekend), thenElon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover is the most interesting [...]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Fin2me\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Liam-Dann-Elon-Musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/\",\"name\":\"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/ad0e9920e03d3b41c7ad02a18375d76a\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Business\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/category\/business\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of ‘the gilded age’\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/\",\"name\":\"Fin2me\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/ad0e9920e03d3b41c7ad02a18375d76a\",\"name\":\"Mark\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/39b72719fb75a2d3c7d7695026648602?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/39b72719fb75a2d3c7d7695026648602?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Mark\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me","og_description":"OPINION: If we forget about inflation briefly (surely we deserve a break for the long weekend), thenElon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover is the most interesting [...]","og_url":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/","og_site_name":"Fin2me","article_published_time":"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00","author":"Mark","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_image":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Liam-Dann-Elon-Musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age.jpg","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Mark","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/","url":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/","name":"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of 'the gilded age' - Fin2me","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#website"},"datePublished":"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00","dateModified":"2022-04-23T18:52:32+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/ad0e9920e03d3b41c7ad02a18375d76a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/business\/liam-dann-elon-musk-and-the-return-of-the-gilded-age\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Business","item":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/category\/business\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Liam Dann: Elon Musk and the return of ‘the gilded age’"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/","name":"Fin2me","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/ad0e9920e03d3b41c7ad02a18375d76a","name":"Mark","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/39b72719fb75a2d3c7d7695026648602?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/39b72719fb75a2d3c7d7695026648602?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Mark"}}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}