Elon Musk’s X endgame
Today’s must-read: The world’s richest man has become a new kind of oligarch, Ali Breland argues.
 

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To call Elon Musk an oligarch is to understate his influence, Ali Breland writes.

(Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Sources: Bloomberg / Getty; Getty.)

 

After spending about $277 million to back Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, [Elon] Musk has become something of a shadow vice president. But it’s not just Musk’s political donations that are driving his influence forward. As his successful tirade against the spending bill illustrates, Musk also has outsize power to control how information is disseminated. To quote Shoshana Zuboff, an academic who has written about tech overreach and surveillance, Musk is an “information oligarch.”

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