Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC on Tuesday, just under a week after the network suspended his show over comments he made about the far-right response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. While it was a welcome change of pace in our current reality to see Kimmel back, at least for now, two days later, the president approved a deal that would hand his allies the video platform TikTok and a level of control over U.S. news and information that not long ago they could only dream of. These two stories are signs of how weak institutional U.S. media platforms, both traditional and social, are at this critical moment. And things are likely to get far worse.
The group of investors in the new TikTok reportedly would include not only media moguls Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, but also major Silicon Valley businesses like venture capital firm Silver Like and software company Oracle, whose founder Larry Ellison is a major Trump ally and the second wealthiest person in the world.
Feeling underserved and unfairly attacked, tech billionaires decided the problem wasn’t their own practices, but the media itself.
TikTok’s sale still has to be finalized, including approval by China. Should the deal go through, though, Ellison would be adding a significant platform to his family’s media empire. His son, David, now owns CBS through his company Paramount Skydance. The younger Ellison is reportedly about to purchase The Free Press in a deal that would hand the conservative outlet’s founder Bari Weiss a senior leadership role at CBS News. And CNBC reports that he is mulling a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN and HBO Max.
This is the latest example of the outcome of a yearslong project on the part of right-wing billionaires to disrupt the media and ultimately take it over to redirect reporting and online scrutiny of them and their allies like the president. As I detail in my recent book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” for many years, Silicon Valley received mostly complimentary coverage from the press. But over the last decade or so, it has faced more critical newsrooms and the investigative spotlight that comes with being at the top of one of the world’s largest industries. Social media companies have come under fire for their policies, like Facebook (by its own admission) letting its platform be used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar and Twitter’s role in shaping public opinion before U.S. elections. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, outed in a post by Gawker affiliate Valleywag in 2007, compared members of the media to “terrorists” in 2009.
Feeling underserved and unfairly attacked, tech billionaires decided the problem wasn’t their own practices, but the media itself. The solution was to break down the industry and reshape it into something more amenable to their interests. “Move fast and break things” — how Mark Zuckerberg termed the philosophy behind the tech industry’s rise to power — was the path forward here as well. Another way to look at it was creating a parallel media establishment that would serve Silicon Valley interests, as tech investor Balaji Srinivasan put it in 2023.








