‘Extra level of power’: billionaires who have bought up the media

theguardian.com:

Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover of Twitter is a “chilling development” in billionaires’ desire to increase their political influence by buying up many of the world’s largest and most influential media brands, a leading British analyst has warned.

Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, said the super-rich have long sought to buy newspapers to help push their agendas and it was now possible to “count on one hand the big media brands that aren’t owned by an oligarch or other billionaire”.

“It’s another sign that the super-wealthy wish to control assets that give them an extra level of power,” she said. “Whatever they may say, that’s the reason why they buy them.

“It is now unusual for major news media not to be owned by a billionaire, and that is why the Guardian [owned by the independent Scott Trust], the Financial Times [owned by the employee-owned Japanese media group Nikkei] and the BBC are consistently shown to be the most trusted news brands.”

The billionaires who now control vast swathes of the media landscape include:

The world’s richest person struck a deal to buy Twitter – journalists’ and politicians’ preferred medium for sharing stories – for $44bn last week, promising to unleash its “extraordinary potential” to boost free speech and democracy across the world.

The Amazon founder and second-richest person in the world ($169bn compared with Musk’s $252bn) bought the Washington Post for $250m in 2013. When Bezos took over, the Post was bleeding money and he said the business model was “upside down”.

He said of his decision to buy the paper: “I had to do some soul-searching … Is this something I want to get involved in? I started to realise this is an important institution.

“It is the newspaper in the capital city of the