Media Circles Drain

I write about Musk. A billionaire freaks out. The media in death throes. And some personal news.

Patrick Soon-Shiong. I’m not going to even mention his bias-o-meter.

Alas. Another overman lost to MAGA. And this one is bringing one of the last American newspapers down with him.

So R.I.P. the heart and soul of my former boss, Patrick Soon-Shiong. Transplant surgeon. $6.9 billion pharma phella. Owner of the LA Times. And now MAGA booster.

Patrick is throttling the LA Times by cracking down on the opinion page. And he’s currying favor with Trump and Musk by crushing negative stories about them.

I have a particular stake in this development because, as Oliver Darcy reported this week, it was an article of mine that set Patrick Soon-Shiong off. That piece, which I wrote through my fever the day after the election, was about Elon Musk. It said, in part:

“Trump and Musk are a match made in some kind of Book-of-Revelation living nightmare. With Trump’s victory, the duo seem to have put themselves safely out of the reach of the law.

For a person [Musk] who controls this much private wealth to have a starring role in the U.S. government is to open the door to conflicts of interest so immense that, if Trump didn’t already pose such an urgent threat to the survival of the republic, it would be all we’d talk about.”

Now let me give you a sense of how spine-chillingly fucked up everything is.

When I started writing the piece on Election Day, Elon Musk’s net worth was $265 billion. While closing the piece a few hours later, I dutifully fact-checked that. He was now worth more than $285 billion.

Yes, in the mere hours since Trump’s victory, Musk had gained $20 billion.

(And today—I checked out of habit—Musk is worth $344 billion. That’s one man’s wealth. Musk’s fortune has long surpassed the GDP of New Zealand, Greece, Hungary, Morocco, Portugal. For contrast: Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth who was assassinated in New York City Wednesday, is thought to be obscenely rich. Thompson’s net worth was $43 million, or .0125% of Musk’s money.)

So—a psychopath and ketamine addict playing fast-and-loose with national security and the nuclear arsenal is now profiteering off the White House. This was newsworthy in the extreme. After all, Musk already holds the whiphand with NASA and the Pentagon, who now depend on him so profoundly that they could barely survive without SpaceX, which controls their space launches and internet satellites.

Musk holds a top secret security clearance. This gives him access to information that could gravely damage national security if disclosed. What’s he been doing with this privilege? Backchanneling with Vladimir Putin.

It’s staggering. Can you imagine, during the Cold War, an unelected private citizen with a sky-high clearance, Pentagon contracts, a personal fortune equal to the GDP of Qatar, and Democratic leanings backchanneling with Nikita Khrushchev?

Any self-respecting Republican would be horrified even thinking of this now. Any American would. People would be talking about treason. But not with Musk.

In any case, my article, the day after the election, was true, interesting, and newsworthy. It was worthy of the LA Times as I knew the newspaper to be, having written for it for nearly a decade, and weekly for many of those years.

But Patrick Soon-Shiong wasn’t having it.

Oliver Darcy, the deeply-sourced reporter who exposes abuses of power by the media first at CNN and now independently at Status, called me Wednesday night.

He dropped this news on me. Soon-Shiong, who had already compromised editorial independence at the Times by spiking the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, had announced new, highly restrictive policy. Because he disliked my piece about Elon Musk so much.