2022年4月15日 星期五

The Daily: The World at a Billionaire’s Whims

And how Elon Musk is asserting his influence.

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.

Author Headshot

By Lauren Jackson

Associate Audience Editor, Audio

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

Elon Musk loves a stunt. Through Twitter alone, he's threatened his company's value by making weed jokes, marketed flamethrowers and challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to "single combat."

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 what's at stake in his attempted hostile takeover of Twitter. Questions have been raised about whether he actually has $43 billion in liquidity to buy the company. But even if Mr. Musk is bluffing, he's still applying his influence and power as the world's wealthiest person to pressure a major social platform into making the changes he both personally wants to see and those he thinks are right for the "future of civilization."

That's a big call. But is it his to make?

Elon's outsize influence

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

On The Daily this week

Monday: A conversation with two warehouse workers, and friends, who beat Amazon and built the giant's first union.

Tuesday: How the war in Ukraine has led President Biden to retreat on his ambitious climate goals.

Wednesday: Russia has narrowed its goals in Ukraine. What does the next phase of the war look like?

Thursday: Elon Musk's major investment in Twitter has sparked debate about the platform's future.

Friday: Inside the case of Dennis Wayne Hope, a Texas man who is taking his case to the Supreme Court after spending 27 years in solitary confinement.

That's it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.

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2022年4月14日 星期四

On Tech: Elon Musk is a digital Citizen Kane

What would Twitter look like with Musk as its sole proprietor?
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For subscribersApril 14, 2022

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Elon Musk is a digital Citizen Kane

Illustration by Nick Sheeran; Photographs by Maja Hitij/Getty Images, Pool photo by Hannibal Hanschke and Bettman, via Getty Images

What if one of the world's important tools for information was owned by a mercurial billionaire who could do whatever he wanted with it?

Yes, I am talking about Elon Musk's proposal to purchase Twitter for himself, which he disclosed on Thursday. His offer works out to more than $43 billion, which is a lot of money, even for Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and the owner of SpaceX. (Musk's letter offering to buy Twitter said that his purchase would be conditioned on finding help in paying for the acquisition. It didn't say where the money might come from.)

Will Musk actually have the cash and attention span to follow through on his proposed acquisition, and will Twitter say yes? Who knows? The word "unpredictable" doesn't do justice to this moment. We're already in Week 2 of Musk and Twitter's very public and rocky romance, and there may be more weirdness to come.

But imagine that Musk eventually buys Twitter from the stockholders who own it today. The closest comparison to this might be the 19th-century newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and the fictional Charles Foster Kane, who used their papers to pursue their personal agendas, sensationalize world events and harass their enemies.

We have not really had a Citizen Kane of the digital age, but Musk might be it. And Twitter's global influence is arguably larger and more powerful than that of any Hearst newspaper of its day.

Jeff Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post and Rupert Murdoch's news media empire are close, perhaps, but this would be a milestone: A 21st-century tech baron's purchase of a digital platform of global importance, with the purpose of recasting it in his image.

"He would be a throwback to the 'Citizen Kane' days of press barons using their newspapers to advance their favorite causes," Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school, told me.

Musk's favorite idea is a Twitter that operates the way he uses Twitter: no holds barred. He imagines a social network transformed, by him, into a paragon of expression without theoretical limits.

It's basically the same pitch that former President Donald J. Trump has for his app, Truth Social. Several other social media sites also promised to build internet gatherings without the arbitrary rules imposed by companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook. But those sites remain relatively small and unimportant compared with Twitter.

Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter, then, would amount to a real-world experiment in a parallel social media app without restrictions on what people can do or say. I don't know what this would look like when applied.

Truth Social does not permit absolute free expression. Few people want to have their social media feeds clogged by spammy advertisements for cryptocurrency, terrorist recruitment pitches or harassment of children. No one is sure what a Twitter that is accountable to no one but Musk would be like. (One intriguing question: Would Musk restore Trump's Twitter account?)

I also wonder if Musk actually wants to own Twitter. It's fun to imagine what you'd do if you were the boss of Twitter, but it's not so fun actually being the boss of Twitter. Look at Mark Zuckerberg running Facebook. That guy does not seem like he's having fun.

"My guess is that Musk enjoys being able to tell Twitter what to do and does not care very much about it actually getting done," the Bloomberg Opinion writer Matt Levine said Tuesday in an eerily prescient column.

If Twitter were solely owned by Musk, he wouldn't have to …

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2022年4月13日 星期三

The T List: Five things we recommend this week

Carmen Winant's solo show, spring looks from Phillip Lim — and more.

Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we're eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.

SEE THIS

Collaged Images of Survival

From left: Carmen Winant's "Violence Is One of the Ways That Men Have Learned to Cope With Stress" (2022) and "Women at Work (Job Cards)" (2022).Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the Print Center, Philadelphia

By Adriane Quinlan

T Contributor

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Carmen Winant is a photographer who rarely takes photos. Instead, she pulls them from pamphlets and papers and installs her findings in ways that overwhelm — for "My Birth" (2018), she taped 2,000 images of childbirth to the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, demanding a reckoning of how the culture has framed and censored an experience that's central to the lives of most women. For the solo show that opens this week in her native Philadelphia at the Print Center, the Columbus, Ohio-based artist delved into the archives of two organizations that support those impacted by domestic violence: the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Women in Transition. Winant braced herself for photographic evidence of violence; instead, she faced piles of materials designed to empower survivors. The resulting pieces include a photo grid of women immersed in work, which Winant found on cards passed out to those seeking to support themselves with a new career; copies of a "power-control" diagram given by social workers to help identify abuse; and imagery of T-shirts decorated by survivors, with puff-paint affirmations like, "I was in a box of pain!! But now I am free!!" "There's agony in the exhibit, but there's so much life-affirming material," Winant says. "I wouldn't have been able to carry on if that wasn't a part of it." "A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures" is on view April 15 through July 16 at the Print Center in Philadelphia, printcenter.org.

WEAR THIS

A Kit of Spring Clothes by Phillip Lim

Looks from Phillip Lim's third men's kit.Arturo Alcalá

By Jameson Montgomery

When the pandemic hit, the New York-based designer Phillip Lim took an entire year off from production of his men's wear line. What began as a logistical need became an opportunity to reconsider that element of his business and, ultimately, to step outside of the relentless fashion calendar and trend cycle for the first time since founding his namesake line in 2005. Last summer, Lim introduced "kits," capsule collections of pieces intended to be mixed and matched as total wardrobes unto themselves; the drops "say everything within one rack," as Lim puts it. For kit 3, out this week, he offers a palette of sedate neutrals with playful details: Nehru-collared shirts, half-zip polos and tapered trousers with built-in belts are smart for whatever iteration of an office comes next but are far from basic. His wearers have always "existed in the space between streetwear and formal tailoring," says Lim, and his goal is to make stylish men's lives a little easier by providing familiar fits season to season, with new details and colors for fresh combinations. He and his customers are pleased with the pivot so far. "They're hooked," the designer says. From $175, 31philliplim.com.

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READ THIS

Ambitious Literary Outlets

From left: Astra's inaugural issue; The Paris Review's spring 2022 issue; The Drift.Courtesy of the publications

By Iva Dixit

From time to time, people like to argue about the death of magazines, the last remaining souvenir of decadence from the floundering publishing industry. Despite such predictions of doom, a surfeit of new or refreshed periodicals have appeared on the literary landscape that are often, finally, led by women. There's Emily Stokes's Paris Review, which announced its new era with a redesign by the book designer Na Kim and a cover by the English artist Rose Wylie (its spring issue features the work of Scottish painter Andrew Cranston, above). Two years ago, Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow launched The Drift, while this month, Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush will debut Cake Zine, a sensualistic examination of pop culture, history, literature and art through the lens of dessert. Perhaps the most striking entrant to the shelf, however, is Astra, out now. With its first issue themed around the idea of ekstasis — ecstasy — its pages include works of fiction and nonfiction by Ottessa Moshfegh, Mieko Kawakami, Solmaz Sharif, Catherine Lacey, Leslie Jamison and many more. Printed with French flaps and in four colors, Astra argues for reviving the pleasure of engaging with literature while also holding a beautifully made object. "It's not easy to find ecstasy in this moment," writes Astra's editor, Nadja Spiegelman. "But it's crucial."

COVET THIS

Ball-Chain Jewelry

Left: At Gucci's spring 2022 show, titled "Love Parade," a model carried a strand of metal beads in a palladium finish. Right, clockwise from top left: Junya Watanabe, $309, farfetch.com. VTMNTS, $766, farfetch.com. Miu Miu, $1,290, miumiu.com. Sophie Buhai, $1,750, sophiebuhai.com. Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, $996, (212) 980-2970.Left: Cosimo Sereni. Right: courtesy of the brands

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The aesthetic of ball-chain jewelry can swing from punk to prim, as with a pearl necklace. Several designers played with the dichotomy with their spring 2022 collections, using the motif to make classic clothes edgy and edgy clothes downright fetishistic. At the Gucci runway show, creative director Alessandro Michele's models walked down Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles wearing latex and lace looks accompanied by ball-chain pendants that, at second glance, revealed themselves to be actual sex toys, while for his namesake line, Junya Watanabe accented ladylike, floral-printed bodices with black and gold spheres worn around the neck. For her play on preppy style at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada paired cable-knit sweaters or button-down shirts — and twice, a "top" consisting just of a basic bra — with chokers studded with pearl-like beads the size of golf balls. Perhaps the most wearable iteration comes from the Los Angeles-based jewelry designer Sophie Buhai, whose Perriand Collar is offered with beads of metal or semiprecious stones such as onyx or lapis. It was named for the signature necklace of the French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, who called the accessory "a symbol of my adherence to the 20th-century machine age," adding, "I was proud that my jewelry didn't rival that of the Queen of England."

SEE THIS

A Re-examination of the 1960s Artist Marisol

From left: Marisol's "Paris Review" (1967) and "Andy" (1962-63).Left: Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. © 2022 Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Digital Image © Acquavella LLC 2022. © 2022 Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

By Rose Courteau

T Contributor

A surprising aspect of cultural erasure is that it can happen in plain sight. Consider María Sol Escobar, known mononymously as Marisol, who earned international renown in the 1960s for her wood carvings and sculptural assemblages — including clever depictions of the Kennedy family and British royals — only to fade into relative obscurity before her death in 2016. "Marisol and Warhol Take New York," at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, helps reset the record by showcasing some of the Paris-born Venezuelan artist's most striking works, which combined Pop Art themes with pre-Columbian folk sensibilities, in conversation with those by her close friend Andy Warhol, who called her "the first girl artist with glamour." The retrospective, originally curated by Jessica Beck at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, is less interested in conferring primacy than establishing their contemporaneity and mutual influence: "The Party," an installation of 15 sculptural self-portraits by Marisol, is stationed directly in front of Warhol's cow wallpaper, a nod to the fact that both debuted in April of 1966. In 1968, Marisol left New York for Europe — a move some have interpreted as a rejection of her success, though she continued to make art. For Maritza Lacayo, the assistant curator at the Pérez, there is no obvious explanation: "I think [when] the world demanded a little bit too much of her, or things weren't aligning with what she wanted, she would simply go elsewhere." "Marisol and Warhol Take New York" is on view April 15 through Sept. 5 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, pamm.org.

FROM T'S INSTAGRAM

A 16th-Century Italian Palace, Made Modern by Gio Ponti

Jasper Fry

On a recent visit to Venice, the British photographer Jasper Fry decided to take a 30-minute train ride to Padua to shoot the Palazzo del Bo. "It's the perfect day trip for a bit of calm away from the mayhem," he says. Part of the University of Padua, the 16th-century Palazzo del Bo underwent a renovation in the 1930s and '40s, with interiors overseen by the Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti. "My images focus on the work of Gio Ponti," says Fry. "His modern and colorful designs sit perfectly among such a classical framework." Filled with furniture designed by Ponti, several of the rooms feature frescoes painted by Pino Casarini and Fulvio Pendini. "It was a joy to photograph — both completely awe-inspiring and ridiculously fun." Read more design coverage at tmagazine.com, and follow us on Instagram.

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