Did you know Silicon Valley virtually owns US mainstream media?

Today social media is probably the most important factor when it comes to moulding public opinion. Till the 2000s the mainstream media ruled the narrative but in the 2010s it totally took over. Earlier heads of states would look at the papers every morning and prime time TV at night to gauge where they stood. Now they probably look at Twitter trends.

Facebook surpassed 2 billion users while Instagram and WhatsApp crossed 1 billion and were being chased by something like TikTok. Mainstream media simply can’t compete. While social media, of course, is owned by Silicon Valley giants, did you know that they virtually own the mainstream media too? First up is the most obvious one. The richest man in the world Jeff Bezos (not Amazon) bought the Washington Post for a cool $250 million way back in 2013. Not to be outdone, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and wife Lynne bought Time magazine for $190 million.

The Atlantic monthly is owned by the Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. If you haven’t guessed already, then Laurene is the widow of billionaire icon Steve Jobs. The MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft, which invested $221 million but later slowly pulled out of the venture. Slate magazine was also once under Microsoft. Both Jobs and Bill Gates had a mainstream media link.

Huffington Post was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million. AOL itself was acquired by Verizon Communications for $4.4 billion. Time Warner was a mainstream media giant and had hundreds of entities (magazines, TV channels etc) including CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, Time magazine etc. The whopping $165 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner fell through at the beginning of the millennium. If not IT then at least ICT. AT&T has taken over Time Warner.

Talking of ICT, Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim is now the single largest shareholder of the New York Times. Coming back to HuffPo, it was founded by a conservative turned liberal (Ariana Huffington) and another conservative (Andrew Breitbart). The other two liberal founders Jonah Peretti and Kenneth Lerer founded Buzzfeed, thanks to, no surprises here, the likes of Softbank and VC firms. Another giant, USA Today, was taken over by Gannett, which is partially owned by Softbank. Vox has also received a lot of VC funding. Vox owns New York magazine.

Ownership is one thing, but donations flow in from Silicon Valley billionaires regularly. Like recently former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave $4.7 million to NPR, which is a national syndicator to more than 1000 public radio stations all over America. There are many such instances. You also cannot really take on a Silicon Valley mogul which the then popular Gawker learned the hard way and it went down under after its confrontation with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and current board member of Facebook. The only person who has managed to retain some control is Rupert Murdoch with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. But you hardly hear much of him nowadays.

Which is more powerful? Social media or mainstream media? To Silicon Valley, it doesn’t matter—they virtually own them both!