The big idea: When the world is at the whim of one billionaire |
The Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper on one of those from our show on Elon Musk and Twitter this week. |
 | | Elon Musk's bid to take over Twitter could have serious implications for political discourse around the world.Patrick Pleul/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images |
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That would all be mostly harmless and fine, if his behavior didn't have seismic ripple effects for the global economy — and potentially for how the public communicates. |
That's a big call. But is it his to make? |
It's not a new question. Conversations on egregious wealth inequality, corporate greed and broken policy mechanisms for redistribution have dominated public discourse since the 2008 financial crash. But in the last few years, evaluating the social and political power of individual billionaires has become more pressing as their wealth and influence has grown. |
In 2017, a report by the charity Oxfam found that the richest eight billionaires on the planet, led at the time by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, were worth more than half of all of the people on earth. Just a few years later, another report by Oxfam showed that many of these men roughly doubled their fortunes during the first two years of the pandemic. |
Between March 2020 and the middle of October 2021, America's billionaires saw their collective wealth soar by 70 percent. And ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization, obtained IRS records showing that some, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have in some years paid no federal income taxes on this wealth. |
It's a state of affairs that outrages many. The progressive left has normalized a moral case against the existence of billionaires, with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez particularly strident in their efforts to tax the superrich. While Americans' views of billionaires have grown increasingly negative, a majority still believe billionaires are neither good nor bad for America. |
According to three political scientists at Northwestern University, this is likely because the true influence of American billionaires is obscured. They argue that most practice "stealth politics," or actively work behind the scenes, deploying immense amounts of capital to shape government policies in their favor. |
But Mr. Musk's attempted buyout this week is far from stealthy. It's a brazen bid to buy then remake the modern public square in his vision — a significant departure from the norms of discretion and obfuscation in influence-peddling that billionaires usually abide by. |
What's different about this moment |
For much of the last century, America's megawealthy have felt compelled to (at least notionally) appear philanthropic, acknowledging a Gospel of Wealth-inspired obligation to redistribute their fortunes for the public good. |
The "public good" has always been subjective (John D. Rockefeller preferenced public health, Andrew Carnegie supported the arts and Bill Gates has invested in global development). But historically, these philanthropic donations have been funneled through foundations — where they were subject to some measure of oversight and accountability. |
As Peter Goodman, global economics correspondent for The Times points out, today's billionaires are increasingly viewing corporate control as a vehicle for acting in the public interest. Through the pervasive power of platform companies, decisions about democracy, misinformation and free speech are being decided by the whims of a select few with no oversight, unprecedented access to capital and, at times, more influence than entire nations. |
"For the first time in history, a small group of private individuals could, if they so choose, materially impact global development at a scale that has previously been the near exclusive domain of governments," Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at Brookings, said. And looking around, the contradictions are stark. |
Laurence D. Fink, the world's largest asset manager, has broadcast his dedication to stakeholder capitalism and social justice while squeezing poor countries to pay impossible debts in the midst of the pandemic. |
Jeff Bezos has amassed enough wealth from his e-commerce empire to revolutionize commercial space travel, as the employees left behind on Earth spent the first months of the outbreak laboring and dying in Amazon warehouses without adequate protective gear. |
Mr. Musk is throwing billions around in a personal crusade to make dramatic reforms to a social media platform he likes to make jokes on — one that also happens to be a primary channel for public information and communication. |
Now, stakeholder capitalism is the vehicle by which Mr. Musk is attempting to influence the public good and strengthen "free speech." And in a country whose legislation has been shaped by those same billionaires, there's nothing under U.S. law stopping him from buying a company with so much power. Even if it's just so he can fix his typos. |
From The Daily team: The FedEx driver and the F.B.I. |
 | | Kenny Holston for The New York Times |
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Below, producer Asthaa Chaturvedi shares one of her favorite episodes of the Daily that she's worked on: "Jan. 6, Part 1: The Herd Mentality," one of three episodes we aired earlier this year to mark the first anniversary of the Capitol riots. It was an episode not only notable for its subject matter but also for its form; it was the first time actors have been used on The Daily. |
Asthaa and the production team behind the episode called on actors to bring to life a transcript of an F.B.I. interview with Robert Reeder, a father and former delivery driver from suburban Maryland who was facing four misdemeanor charges for entering the Capitol. Here's what Asthaa had to say about the episode. |
How did "Herd Mentality" come to be? |
The Daily team was brainstorming how to cover the anniversary of Jan. 6 and I had spent the year really wanting to get inside the mind of the mob, which had proven to be a challenge because a lot of people involved weren't willing to talk to reporters. I had several conversations with Times reporter Alan Feuer about how to tell the story of who these rioters were, what motivated them and what that might mean for the future of American democracy. |
At the heart of the episode is the story of a single person, Robert Reeder. How did you come across his story and the transcript of his interview with the F.B.I.? |
Alan told our team that he had acquired three transcripts of F.B.I. interviews and one of them was superinteresting. Executive editor Lisa Tobin read through the Robert Reeder transcript and agreed, so a production team was brought together. Our team was drawn to the fact that the interview revealed how a lot of the people who were there that day were just average citizens. |
The episode featured actors playing the roles of Robert Reeder and the F.B.I. agents. It's not something the Daily had done before, how did you settle on the format? |
We basically thought, is there a way to reconstruct this interview and edit it only for clarity and for length? We had Austin Mitchell on the team, who was an actor at one point before becoming a journalist and had a lot of experience directing people for radio. And of course, we could tap into Alan's expertise. So we felt like all the ingredients were there, and we should try to find actors to create an interesting portrait of January 6th that our listeners may not have heard before. |
To play Reeder, we wanted to get somebody who could, on a very even keel and without inserting too much of their emotion or their own interpretation to it, just say these lines, so we asked Michael Paulson, the Times theater critic, and he connected us with the main actor, Steven Pasquale. Also, Austin has connections with a casting director who helped us find the actor for the main F.B.I. agent, and there was a second F.B.I. agent at the interview who was male so Austin just played him. |
How long did this process take? |
It was just a month of production but in some ways it was a yearlong process because the ideas in this episode took nearly a year of conversation with Alan to nail down and hone in on. That's kind of the beauty of being a Daily producer, you start a story and sometimes, for whatever reason, it doesn't work out immediately but if you keep on following it and you keep on checking in with reporters, the right moment strikes and you're ready to share it with the world. |
What is it about the episode that makes it your favorite? |
It was the fact that we broke the format. I think that we managed to pull off something that was very sensitive with a kind of risky approach — and I love when we do that as a show. The episode really drew on the strength of every team member and there was a lot of intention and thought that went into the structure of it, which I like to think The Daily is the best at. |
Listen to the season premiere of Still Processing |
Wesley Morris, a co-host of Still Processing, has been obsessed with lists since he was a child — think Casey Kasem's American Top 40, the Academy Awards and Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of All Time. Now, he wants to think more seriously about expanding what we call the canon, making sure more people have a say in which works of art are considered great, enduring and important. |
For guidance, Wesley sits down with Daphne A. Brooks, an academic, critic and music lover, to ask whether expanding the canon is even the right way to think about this. Have a listen to the season premiere below. |
That's it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week. |
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