Politics & Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 23, 2026
This week Elon Musk invested $1 billion in Skydance — the company that now owns CNN, CBS, and HBO. Musk already owns X, the platform that has become the primary infrastructure of American political communication. He owns SpaceX, which holds billions in government defense contracts. He has a formal role in the United States government through the Department of Government Efficiency. He is considering merging SpaceX and Tesla into a single entity.
This week a New Mexico jury found Meta lied to its users about privacy 43 million times. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — the communication infrastructure for billions of people worldwide including hundreds of millions of Americans.
These two stories, reported in the same news cycle, describe the same underlying reality. The United States no longer has a free market. It has a managed economy controlled by a small number of individuals whose combined ownership of platforms, media, cloud infrastructure, government contracts, and communication channels has no precedent in American history.
The map of control
Elon Musk: X. SpaceX. Tesla. A stake in CNN, CBS, and HBO through Skydance. A formal government role. Billions in federal contracts.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook. Instagram. WhatsApp. The primary social communication infrastructure for billions of people — now found by a jury to have been built on systematic deception.
Jeff Bezos: Amazon. AWS — the cloud infrastructure that runs the US government, the CIA, and most of the internet. The Washington Post.
Larry Ellison: Oracle — which holds the data infrastructure contracts for the US government and federal intelligence agencies. His son David now controls CNN, CBS, and HBO.
These are not separate competing companies operating in a free market. They are interlocking ownership structures managed by people who know each other, invest in each other, and share a common interest in maintaining the conditions that allow their dominance to continue.
What a free market requires
A free market requires that new competitors can enter and challenge incumbents. It requires that no single player controls the infrastructure that competitors must use to reach customers. It requires that the platforms where commerce and communication happen are not owned by the same people whose businesses depend on controlling what those platforms amplify and suppress.
None of those conditions currently exist in the United States.
A startup that tries to compete with Facebook must advertise on Facebook to reach users. A media company that tries to compete with the Washington Post must use AWS to host its content. A political candidate who challenges the interests of platform owners must use those same platforms to communicate with voters.
When the infrastructure is owned by the incumbents, competition is not forbidden. It is simply made impossible at scale.
What this means for democracy
Elections require communication. Candidates must reach voters. Voters must receive information. That communication now flows almost entirely through platforms owned by the same small group of people whose businesses, government contracts, and personal wealth are directly affected by who wins those elections.
A declared presidential candidate can be banned from every major platform simultaneously. Their content can be made invisible. Their reach can be algorithmically suppressed from the moment they file to run. There is no regulatory body with the authority or the will to stop it. There is no competing platform with the reach to replace what was taken.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is a documented reality playing out in federal courts right now.
The $25 billion verdict in context
A jury found Meta guilty of 43 million violations of consumer protection law. A judge ordered $25 billion. Meta will appeal. Interest accrues at 15% annually.
Twenty five billion dollars is approximately three weeks of Meta's annual revenue. It is a significant number. It is not a number that changes Meta's behavior, restructures its market power, or restores the data it collected while lying to its users.
The fine is not a solution. It is evidence that the problem exists and that existing legal frameworks are insufficient to address it.
What accountability looks like
Real accountability for concentrated corporate power does not come from fines that represent weeks of revenue. It comes from structural remedies — forced divestitures, interoperability requirements, prohibition on owning both the infrastructure and the businesses that depend on it.
No such remedies are currently being pursued by the federal government. The people in the federal government are the same people who hold stakes in the companies that would be subject to those remedies.
When the same small group controls the platforms, the media, the cloud, the government contracts, and the government itself — accountability requires someone outside that group to demand it.
That is what elections are for. That is what courts are for. That is what a free press is for.
All three are currently operating under conditions shaped by the same concentration of power they are supposed to check.
NewsOnScale is owned by AMILLI AI, Corp., founded by JJ Johnson. JJ Johnson is a declared 2028 presidential candidate. FEC filing: JJJOHNSON2028.