Mr. Bezos started spending more time on Blue Origin, which has operations in Texas and Florida, personally taking the company's first trip into space in 2021. As Mr. Bezos stayed away from Washington, Mr. Musk grew his business empire and links to Washington. He has regularly visited senior lawmakers to press his views on A.I., electric vehicles, global satellite communications and space travel.
Mr. Musk's SpaceX is years ahead of Blue Origin. SpaceX has developed into an important federal contractor, providing transportation for NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a biotech entrepreneur, best known for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane. In 2018, he purchased a number of publications, including The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune as well as a few other publications for $500 million.
Soon-Shiong's net worth is $6.2 billion as of 2024. He has been called the richest man in Los Angeles and one of the wealthiest doctors in the world. Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa to Chinese immigrant parents. He moved to the United States in 1984 at age 32.
Laurene Powell Jobs is an American billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist. She is the widow of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple She is a major donor to Democratic politicians. Jobs is the majority owner of The Atlantic magazine through her Emerson Collective organization. Powell Jobs acquired her stake in Emerson in 2017 for over $100 million. She is reported to be worth $10 billion.
About the same time that Bezos bought The Washington Post, billionaire sports magnate John Henry paid $70 million to purchase The Boston Globe from The New York Times. The Globe needed a large cash infusion just like the Post. Henry made his fortune trading commodity futures before building a sports empire that includes the Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club. Forbes recently estimated his net worth as $6 billion.
Henry wasn't the only wealthy person to buy his local sports team and newspaper. In 2014, Glen Taylor purchased The Minnesota Star Tribune for nearly $100 million. Taylor is a former Republican state senator and the owner of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves.
Taylor made his fortune as the founder and owner of Minnesota-based Taylor Corporation, one of the largest graphic communication companies in the United States. Forbes estimated Taylor's net worth at $2 billion. In 2024, the Minnesota Star Tribune announced that it would not endorse a candidate for president, although the paper has a history of endorsing candidates in the past. Taylor is a moderate Republican, not a Trump supporter.
Miriam Adelson, a billionaire GOP donor who has given $100 million to support Donald Trump's presidential campaigns, owns the Las Vegas Review Journal. The late Sheldon Adelson's acquisition of The Las Vegas Review-Journal was a controversial one . In 2015, the casino magnate secretly bought the daily newspaper, which was often critical of him. According to reports, he sought to influence what the publication's journalists covered and how they did it, prompting several senior staff members to leave. Sheldon Adelson developed hotels in Las Vegas and Macao. His widow, Miriam Adelson is worth $34 billion.
In 2018, Marc Benioff and his wife bought Time magazine for $190 million.
Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce said he wanted to give the magazine the financial muscle "to carry out its mission to provide truthful, trustworthy information to readers" and basically act as a "steward" of real journalism in a time when trust is lacking and misinformation is spread by dubious sources.
Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999 in a San Francisco apartment and defined its mission in a marketing statement as "The End of Software." This was a slogan he used frequently to preach about software on the Web, and used this as a guerilla marketing tactic. Forbes estimates Benioff's fortune to be worth $6 billion.
A Wakeup Call
The 2024 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump's threats to punish his enemies, has caused many of these oligarchs to impose their will on the editors of newspapers that they own to refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris. The editorial staffs of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union Tribune all wanted to endorse Harris for president but their oligarch owners intervened to stop them. John Henry had the guts to allow the Boston Globe to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
At the same time Adelson's Las Vegas Review-Journal endorsed Trump for president and Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, jumped on the Trump bandwagon. While Russia is supporting Donald Trump for president, do we want America's leading newspapers to stand aside and fail to endorse Kamala Harris because their oligarch owners are calling the shots? We are allowing billionaire oligarchs to elect our leaders-- this is not what the Founding Fathers intended.
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