The Digital Dearborn: How Billionaire Media Control Threatens Democracy

Intro and Context

It’s astounding that this even needs to be said: the world’s richest man should not double as Speaker of the House or have the power to derail government function via tweets, no matter how aligned his politics are with our current GOP majority. Early Wednesday, Musk began attacking Speaker Johnson’s stopgap spending bill—posting about it 25 times in 24 hours, starting at 4 AM. Here’s a sample of some of what he said:

Note: I remind the reader that this man controls 6 companies and a super PAC, so one wonders where he gets so much time to tweet. Surely the job of an executive, especially one as busy as he, requires more involved labor?

Now, far be it for me to suggest that the visionary chief executive of such successful and relevant companies as The Boring Company and X (Twitter) may not understand what he discusses here, but maybe he should prioritize posting during daylight? I certainly experience something of a degradation of my ability to be rational and think critically in the later hours of the night, especially on weekdays - it’s inherent to our biology. Musk may or may not have some other factors affecting his judgement and risk assessment skills beyond simple sleep deprivation, but it’s worth noting regardless as his personal irresponsibility continues to affect our political machine.

As always, there were many MAGA goofballs eager to take up this “fight” with Speaker Johnson - himself something of a MAGA goofball - and through them, Musk has seemingly gotten his wish, with this previously broadly supported bill’s procedure grinding to a halt early in the evening on the 18th - the same day as Musk’s initial, hyper-targeted round of posting. He also encouraged his Twitter followers to call their local representatives and politely inform them not to vote for this bill, with predictable results:

“Our constituents, the people who elected us, are listening to Elon Musk. My phone was ringing off the hook today.” - Rep. Andy Barr (R., Ky.)

“We are not wanting to burn bridges before the administration comes in. We need to hear what [Elon Musk] is saying.” - Rep. Robert Aderholt (R., Ala.)

Best of all, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) floated the notion of installing Musk as House Speaker, noting that there is no constitutional requirement for the Speaker to be an elected official. Whether or not the world’s richest man, owner and chief executive of six multi-billion dollar companies -including one rather conspicuous defense contractor - should also be put in charge of wrangling the House of Representatives’ dysfunction is an exercise I will leave to the reader. I’m sure you can gather my opinion on it.

Historical Parallels: Dearborn Dominance

Elon Musk is far from the first industry titan to use the levers of media ownership to amplify his personal worldview and politics. Let’s go back to the late 1910s, shortly after the end of the First World War, to provide us some additional historical context that is sorely lacking today. Henry Ford, a titanic figure in the industrial and economic history of America, acquired the struggling Detroit-based newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1918 through his aide and private secretary Ernest G. Liebold, and would embark on quite the campaign of promoting Henry Ford’s own rabid antisemitism and disinformation as “news.” Publication was done from a used printing press located in The Rouge’s tractor plant and inaugurated in January 1919. Ford, having already ensured that anyone he hired either shared his views or didn’t want to get in the way, did not write the articles or pieces in the Independent himself; rather, he dictated his view to his executive secretary Ernest Liebold as well as William J. Cameron, who replaced E. G. Pipp as managing editor of the Independent after Pipp learned of the planned stories in April 1920 and quit in disgust. Cameron’s job was to transliterate Ford’s spoken words into a comprehensible article, and Liebold’s was to find “evidence” and other complimentary material to support what Ford said. Finally, Ford imposed a quota system for promoting the Independent at his dealers, ensuring a constant source of demand and method of distribution for the paper. This marked the beginning of the most concerted public effort to legitimize this sort of bigotry until, well, you know.

(Notably, Ford also refused to hire even a single Jew for office work - though, naturally, he did hire them for physical labor jobs. Sound familiar?)

The first of these articles was published in the Independent in May 1920, running such pieces as “Jewish Power and America’s Money Famine,” which posited that the purported power exercised by Jews over the nation’s money supply was insidious in some way, and deprived good ol’ (white) American farmers and others outside the realm of banking access to money when they needed it most.

“Where is the American gold supply? … It may be in the United States but it does not belong to the United States. [After posing this question, the article goes on to conclude that Jews controlled the gold supply, and by extension, American money]

More interestingly, another article, titled “Jewish Idea Molded Federal Reserve System,” was a rather direct reflection of Ford’s own personal distrust of the newly-minted Federal Reserve System, believing it to be secretive and insidious in some esoteric way. Ford, while nominally maintaining some distance from these articles published in the Independent, did not allow anything in the paper to be published without his final approval. For 91 weeks this series of articles continued, pinning cultural developments such as jazz music, “immoral” books, flashy jewelry, and alcohol consumption on the pervasive influence of the Jews.

It’s worth spending a moment to discuss probably the most influential idea discussed in the Independent, that being The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This series of publications in the paper went deeper on the ideas of Jewish financial control of the world, carrying these articles from 1920-21:

1. Jewish Idea in American Monetary Affairs: The remarkable story of Paul Warburg, who began work on the United States monetary system after three weeks residence in this country
2. Jewish Idea Molded Federal Reserve System: What Baruch was in War Material, Paul Warburg was in War Finances; Some Curious revelations of money and politics.
3. Jewish Idea of a Central Bank for America: The evolution of Paul M. Warburg's idea of Federal Reserve System without government management.
4. How Jewish International Finance Functions: The Warburg family and firm divided the world between them and did amazing things which non-Jews could not do
5. Jewish Power and America's Money Famine: The Warburg Federal Reserve sucks money to New York, leaving productive sections of the country in disastrous need.
6. The Economic Plan of International Jews: An outline of the Protocolists' monetary policy, with notes on the parallel found in Jewish financial practice.

The Times of London quickly ran a story discrediting these documents as forgeries, but not before this series of ideas quickly ingratiated itself into the spheres of antisemites and reactionaries the world over. Ford was quickly emerging as a respected spokesperson for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice. (Sound familiar?)

Next comes the truly interesting part. In the German Weimar Republic through the early 1920s, both republished articles from the Dearborn Independent and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were reprinted in German as a set of four volumes, titled collectively The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem. Now, you may be thinking: what did a certain German political reactionary think of Ford’s works? As a matter of fact, Adolf Hitler had a full-length portrait of Henry Ford at the headquarters of the National Social Party - he “revered” Ford, according to sources from the time. On February 1st, 1924, Ford even received Kurt Lüdecke, a representative of Hitler, at his home, where he was introduced by Siegfried Wagner and his wife Winfried, both Nazis themselves. Though the Ford Motor Company disputes this, Lüdecke allegedly asked Ford for a contribution to the Nazi cause, however it is unknown if this truly ever happened. What is known is that Hitler quoted the Dearborn Independent in Mein Kampf, and mentioned Ford by name, the only American that he specifically named.

While Ford was eventually forced to abolish the Independent after a libel lawsuit was brought against it by San Francisco lawyer and Jewish farm co-op organizer Aaron Sapiro as well as a concerted public pressure campaign from the Anti-Defamation League, Ford never truly recanted his views - the public letter of apology he released was written by others and reportedly used a forged signature, and Ford himself stated in 1940 that he “…hoped to publish The International Jew again some time.”

Now, why is this historical anecdote relevant today? I believe it illuminates the ways our media has - and hasn’t - changed since the 1920s. Ownership still plays a massive role in the editoral slant of mass media, even in the Information Age. Just look at biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, current owner of the L.A. Times - not only did he personally step in to block the publication of an already written endorsement of Kamala Harris by the L.A. Times newsroom (an “honor” he shares with Jeff Bezos, who did the same at the Washington Post), he has directed said newsroom to “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump, and proposed implementing a “bias meter” on all L.A. Times stories using AI technology from his other companies. This may be a more traditional media example, but it highlights the outsized role that the personal views of a given publication’s ownership has over its editorial direction and decision-making.

Relevance to Today’s Political Quandary

Finally, we return to today, and our central figure of this piece - Elon Musk. Much like Henry Ford's manipulation of media to amplify his personal beliefs, Musk’s actions through X reflect a modern, digital extension of this historical trend. By acquiring and reshaping a major communication platform, Musk has positioned himself as a direct influencer of political and social discourse, paralleling Ford’s use of the Dearborn Independent to disseminate his ideology. While his influence over media may follow similar trajectories to Ford’s, Bezos’, and Soon-Shiong’s, Musk is far more explicit in his political projects and ambitions. Whether that is by intention or simply a consequence of his worldview is unclear. Regardless, Musk has taken to creating and amplifying voices with very similar worldviews and ideologies to his own (and Henry Ford’s) via his 2023 acquisition of X, neé Twitter, and using those voices to very publicly shift a major social platform (and, in his mind, the Overton window of U.S. politics) to the right. This is very different in mechanism from the Dearborn Independent - whereas that publication was a physical good and required the existing enormous dealer infrastructure that Ford had set up for his automotive business for distribution, what Musk has done is more akin to buying the pipes through which information is transmitted, sent, and received, for a global social network of over 300 million people (though how many of those users remain active on the platform is unknown). What is known is that the vaunted Twitter algorithm, technology that takes posts from the “firehose” of raw data streaming rapidly into their systems from users around the world and carefully tailors what is shown publicly to the preferences of users, has been radically redone under Musk’s management. One of his first actions as owner of Twitter was a series of mass layoffs that were ostensibly targeted at reducing costs, as due to the loans Musk had taken on to buy the company, Twitter was now responsible for servicing over $1 billion in debt payments every year. However, the mechanisms that decided which Twitter employees were let go and which were retained wasn’t decided based on silly things like merit, technical skill, relevance, etc. rather, Musk targeted specific departments of the company, notably Trust and Safety, for particular “trimming.” That department is responsible for the moderation of Twitter’s content and ensuring nasty, often illegal content did not proliferate on an American company’s public network. This, of course, was unacceptable to Musk, who by this point had thoroughly convinced himself that all this department (and others like it at Google, Meta, etc.) did was to unjustly and unaccountably censor the speech of conservative-aligned voices on these online platforms. This is, of course, ignorant of things like these platforms’ terms of service, which, although not legally binding, outlined the types of content permitted on these websites - terms which these conservative voices routinely violated, and were given much leniency for doing so. An easy example of this is Musk’s favorite “journalism” outlet the Babylon Bee getting its account banned for repeatedly violating Twitter’s policies on hate speech through many odious “satirical” articles about the Biden administration’s Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine. (This action is said to be what originally inspired Musk to pursue the Twitter acquisition - explicitly demanding moderation changes that aligned with his conservative worldview) Twitter, while public in its mode of access, is not a true “public square;” the U.S. government does not control it or designate what speech is permitted - as Twitter is a private company, they make the rules on the content allowed on their services, and are not obligated to abide by government principles such as the First Amendment. To summarize, Musk’s editorial influence on Twitter is far more pervasive than even the ghostwriting that Henry Ford did for the Dearborn Independent - Musk makes most major moderation decisions himself, a power he once viciously attacked Twitter’s prior management for exercising during the COVID-19 pandemic to dispel widespread medical misinformation.

Now, where does that leave us with regards to today’s political gridlock? Musk was able to singlehandedly, with a stroke of a virtual keyboard, stall a broadly supported spending bill designed to avert a government shutdown until it was essentially dead in the water - an action that wouldn’t have been possible without his command and control of one of the most central media and information distribution platforms in the world, much less in America. One can quibble over the declining cultural relevance of Twitter post-acquisition and whether or not it truly maintains its place as “the world’s town square” after many parties, from everyday users to the advertisers that pay its bills, have been driven off the platform by its new editorial slant, but its utility as a massive megaphone for amplifying right-wing and reactionary voices cannot be overlooked. This is the same utility that the Dearborn Independent provided Henry Ford, and later, Adolf Hitler. It is worth examining the parallels between these two situations - while this contemporary example certainly required less personal effort on the part of Musk, he is no less involved in pushing a specific worldview than Ford was with the Independent, arguably more so.

How Did This Happen?

The point of this piece is that these figures should not have the power to broadly influence our political functions and societal direction via their personal wealth, no matter how relevant or successful their corporate empires are. A person whose company makes cars, or enterprise software, or even operates retail stores should not be able to take that vast wealth their enterprises have created and utilize it to push their worldview onto the broader public. This mechanism has largely been enabled by the last forty or so years of deregulatory attitudes among government and corporate officials, leading all the way back to the Reagan administration, though the roots of all American corporate evils do not lay at their feet - only most of them. The demise of the (admittedly flawed) Fairness Doctrine in 1987 portended the enabling of this sort of partisan influence at the mass scales it happens at today, with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 continuing this trend through its relaxation of media ownership laws that enabled further media consolidation and expanded the reach of large corporate media organizations like News Corp. nationwide. Finally, the last factor that allowed for such monied interests to steer the ship, as it were, was the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. F.E.C., which infamously held that the federal government cannot restrict independent expenditures by corporations, unions, and nonprofits to campaigns, allowing these groups to “independently” support political candidates financially. This ruling is largely responsible for the explosion of political spending in the past decade and a half, with the ten largest donors (and their spouses) spending a total of $1.2 billion - or 7% of all election-related contributions - on federal elections in the decade since, according to a 2020 report by OpenSecrets. Over the course of the past decade, election-related spending by non-partisan independent groups drastically increased to $4.5 billion, whereas from 1990 to 2010 this spending totaled $750 million, a 600% increase over the previous twenty years.

Where We Can Go From Here

While this may seem dire, there are concrete steps we can take to diminish the influence of money on our politics and media. The first and most important thing we can (and should) do is real, actual regulation of technology companies, specifically focusing on antitrust action. This may be a little outside the scope of what the average U.S. citizen can accomplish themselves, but current FTC commissioner Lina Khan did a fantastic job in her brief tenure going after a few of the very information giants that control so much of our lives. For example, Google is now having to fundamentally rethink its structure and business model due to losing the (first) FTC and DOJ search case against it - the government legally found it to be a monopoly! As of the time of writing, while remedies have not been decided yet, proposed measures include the full divestiture of Chrome from Google proper - a move that would almost certainly open up the web browser market for more competition and seriously weaken Google’s ability to maintain its monopoly on search. There’s a lot more I want to say about the Google antitrust cases, and where they are headed given the incoming Trump administration’s deference, shall we say, to tech oligarchs, but there’s still much to unpack there - I think a future blog post will go over that in more detail. Whatever the case, I invoke antitrust and regulation because these platforms and the companies that operate them should be comprehensively regulated by the government as other important industries are, and regulations include proper enforcement of securities laws and prevention of anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions. Facebook buying Instagram in 2012 comes to mind, or for a much more interesting merger, Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity. For whatever reason, over the past decade and a half, our government has sort of disagreed with the concept of regulating tech; I can’t quite explain why yet, but I’m sure I’ll explore it here sometime in the future. There are a lot of unanswered questions and unsolved problems left for us here, so I will leave you, the reader, with a little parting gift of positivity, to temper the rest of this piece’s tone.

We as the consumers need to be more intentional, more thoughtful about how we interface with technology too. While I completely understand the difficulty of that statement - social media companies in particular have spent the last decade trying to ascertain the most effective ways to psychologically manipulate their users into staying on their platforms longer - I think it’s a step we need to take, and one that, while challenging, will begin to reorient our relationship with technology towards a healthier information environment. Many of the problems we face are structural, and thus rather difficult to address as a user, but this is a concrete step we can all take, however gradually, towards winning the war for our information.

In reflecting on the trajectory from Henry Ford's monopolization of media for ideological purposes to Elon Musk's algorithmic dominance, we find ourselves staring at a disconcerting constant: the ability of immense wealth to disproportionately influence public discourse and, by extension, political outcomes. It's a sobering reminder that technological progress doesn’t necessarily equate to social or democratic progress. While the medium has shifted from print to pixels, the endgame of using media as a megaphone for private agendas remains unchanged.

The implications are profound, particularly in an era where information flows faster and farther than ever before. A single individual, armed with an unchecked communication platform and immense resources, can amplify their worldview in ways that disrupt not just discourse but also governance. The derailment of crucial government processes by a billionaire's late-night Twitter binge isn't merely a cautionary tale – it's an indictment of our current systems and their inability to safeguard democratic institutions from concentrated power.

This isn’t a problem with simple solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s insurmountable. Structural changes—including robust antitrust enforcement, tighter media ownership regulations, and meaningful campaign finance reform—are essential. These aren't quick fixes, but they’re necessary if we want to prevent the further erosion of democratic norms by unchecked wealth and influence.

However, while we advocate for these systemic reforms, we must also recognize our agency in this dynamic. We wield power as consumers of information, and our choices—whether to amplify inflammatory content, to support independent journalism, or to engage critically with digital platforms—play a role in shaping the media landscape. Intentional engagement won’t dismantle the structures of influence overnight, but it’s a meaningful step toward reclaiming some measure of control in an ecosystem that often feels out of our hands.

Ultimately, the story of Ford and Musk isn’t just about individual figures; it’s about the systems that enable their outsized influence and the collective actions required to challenge them. Democracy demands more than passive participation. It demands vigilance, accountability, and an unwavering commitment to a more equitable and truthful information environment—one where no single individual, no matter how wealthy, can claim such influence over our political process.