In a kleptocracy, antitrust is not a tool for diluting monopoly power, but for concentrating it.
During his first term, Donald Trump openly fantasized about using federal antitrust provisions to break up media conglomerates and tech companies he felt threatened by. While perhaps effectual to some degree as intimidation, Trump always backed off, perhaps recognizing that prolonged antitrust battles against giant multinationals were risky, both in terms of messaging and execution.
As Trump returns to power, his team now realizes that it is not the punishment provisions of U.S. antitrust law, but rather its implicit permission powers which the executive branch can wi…
In a kleptocracy, antitrust is not a tool for diluting monopoly power, but for concentrating it.
During his first term, Donald Trump openly fantasized about using federal antitrust provisions to break up media conglomerates and tech companies he felt threatened by. While perhaps effectual to some degree as intimidation, Trump always backed off, perhaps recognizing that prolonged antitrust battles against giant multinationals were risky, both in terms of messaging and execution.
As Trump returns to power, his team now realizes that it is not the punishment provisions of U.S. antitrust law, but rather its implicit permission powers which the executive branch can wield far more effectively, and without the inconvenience of due process. Rather than trying to break up corporate monopolies they can’t control, why not create or expand ones they believe they can?
Those permission powers have been on full display since July, when the Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger was announced, after which followed a series of widely-covered programming changes allegedly tailored to presidential tastes, and then an FCC approval conditioned on further censorious changes, to which Paramount Skydance happily conceded.1 Those conditions were the pretext for the $150 million acquisition of *The Free Press *announced this week, simultaneous with the installing of its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
While I see *The Free Press *and CBS News as among the least consequential subsidiaries of the emergent Ellison Family Media Empire, their combination makes transparent the overall design. What the Trump administration’s antitrust agenda has underwritten is not so much a media conglomerate as a surveillance agency, and it is one which will likely persist, after the near-term political turmoil, whether as a parallel media infrastructure serving the jilted broligarchy or as the paragovernmental arm of a post-democratic dynasty.
The Paramount Skydance merger was bankrolled mostly by Larry Ellison, whose son became CEO of the new company, the first in a series of related acquisitions by Ellison, his companies, and his co-investors. Most notably, besides The Free Press, Paramount is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (their closest competitor) and Ellison’s Oracle Corporation is taking the largest stake in the TikTok USA deal being brokered by Trump himself. Assuming these deals are completed as reported and rubber-stamped, it will have taken Ellison less than six months to construct the second-largest media conglomerate in the U.S.
This unique feat of blitzscaling, in the language of Silicon Valley, would not have been possible without a friendly kleptocratic federal government, but also not without ready access to hundreds of billions of dollars in credit and co-investment, capital which maybe a dozen individuals in the world beside Ellison could’ve raised. Depending on how you see it, these creditors and co-investors either now exert influence on the newly-formed Ellison Family Media Empire by expecting returns on their investments, or (as I am more inclined to believe) they now find themselves locked into Ellison’s circle of influence, the businesses they run regarded by Ellison and his fellow kleptocrats, in and out of government (an increasingly facile distinction), as de facto extensions of that empire.
The “move fast and break things” entrepreneurial ethos of venture capitalists (who Catherine Bracy dubs “world eaters”) has been the perfect complement to the totalitarian sprint past democratic safeguards plotted by reactionary strategists like Curtis Yarvin, Russ Vought, and the Heritage Foundation. Speed is imperative for both projects, as is the conflation of the two. A legion of libertarian technocrats who currently believe they are dismantling the “nanny state” will someday realize they have actually been supporting the most ambitious attempt at central planning, civilian surveillance, and behavioral control since the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
That attempt may yet fail. Fascism is moving too slow, the fascists keep saying.2 And they may be right. The time it takes to stage the theater of illiberal democracy is also time during which more and more people are liable to recognize (and maybe object to) what comes next.
Ellison, like the rest of the ideologues in Trump’s orbit, has not been shy about sharing his vision of totalitarian control through networked information technology. During the Q&A of an Oracle Corporation event last year, Ellison rambled on about multi-level global tracking systems recording and digitizing every aspect of human behavior and analyzing it with artificial intelligence in real time to deliver a diner menu of dystopian tropes: crime prediction, eugenic mapping, locked-down schools, automated quarantines, bathroom cameras, etc. “Citizens will be on the their best behavior,” Ellison enthuses, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on. And its unimpeachable…because AI is monitoring the video.”
Tim Fries, a private equity principle and analyst, doesn’t regard what Ellison is building as a media conglomerate at all, but rather an “emerging AI-powered military industrial complex.” If you believe, as Ellison does, that Americans will be better off when they are subjected to “supervision at all times,” then buying microvideo and microblogging platforms, enterprise software, streaming services, cable networks, mobile and console gaming developers, and internet publishers is just buying supervision capacity. The Ellison Family Media Empire is poised to have access, aggregation, and analysis powers over titanic swaths of time which people spend consuming networked media. This is not precisely Big Brother as George Orwell imagined it, but it’s the infrastructure out of which Big Brother might be scaled.
Students at Northwestern University got a peek at a Big Brother Beta upon returning to campus this Fall. As Nineth Kanieski Koso has been covering for *The Daily Northwestern, the university changed the Student Code of Conduct over the summer to require a series of “bias training” videos allegedly aimed at combating Antisemitism and Islamophobia. However, as one Jewish student told Koso, the Antisemitism Here/Now video produced by the Jewish United Fund “is absolutely one of the most antisemitic things I’ve seen on campus.” While Beyond The Headlines: Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, & Anti-Palestinian Bias, as Len Gutkin put it in The Chronicle Review, *is “an almost perfectly meaningless soup of evasive abstractions.”
A relatively small group of Northwestern students objected, boycotting the training and holding protests on campus, upon which “the University doubled down on the mandatory completion of the training, escalating consequences to include potential loss of student status, financial aid and on-campus housing.” While Koso and Gutkin have thus far, with good reason and incisive reporting, focused on the producers of the training videos and the intransigence of the Northwestern administration, I want to draw attention to the platform via which the videos are being delivered: Qualtrics XM.
Qualtrics XM is a Software As A Service (SaaS) platform (mayday, mayday) which markets heavily to colleges and universities. According to their website, Qualtrics XM is “trusted by over 1,200 Higher Education partners.” Qualtrics started primarily as a digital survey tool, utilized by both non-academic staff and social science researchers, but in 2018, at the same time Qualtrics XM was launched, Qualtrics rebranded themselves as an “experience management company” (that’s what the XM stands for). In other words, they became a technofeudal surveillance operation. Qualtrics still provides survey tools, but the XM platform also delivers dynamic multimedia that measures and metricizes user engagement.
Qualtrics XM quickly became the company’s signature product, and Qualtrics became a trendy tech brand, with investors circling. Among them was a private equity firm focused on technology, Silver Lake Partners, who took a $500 million stake in Qualtrics upon its IPO in 2021. That purchase qualified for a seat on Qualtrics’ board of directors, which would be occupied by Silver Lake’s current co-CEO, Egon Durban. Within two years, Durban would help convince his fellow board members to accept a leveraged buyout led by Silver Lake to take Qualtrics private again. By the Summer of 2023, Silver Lake owned outright what was then probably the largest and most powerful privately-owned platform for aggregating HigherEd data.
At $12.5 billion, the Qualtrics buyout was, briefly, the largest deal in Silver Lake’s history, but it was a lower valuation than the 2021 IPO and part of a trend of Silver Lake directors, particularly Durban, converting board seats at public companies into leveraged buyouts by Silver Lake, a “complex deal dance,” as the Financial Times called it, which other board members and competing firms sometimes objected to. Less than a year earlier, Durban had been booted from Twitter’s board under suspicion his allegiance to Elon Musk (who has a history of investing with Silver Lake) was in conflict with his fiduciary duty as a board member considering Musk’s purchase offer.
In addition to being a “longtime business associate and backer of Elon Musk,” as CNBC put it, Durban has a reputation for working closely with one of Musk’s most prominent co-investors in the Twitter deal, Larry Ellison.
With Durban as face of the firm, Silver Lake has become the most extensive co-signer of the emergent Ellison Family Media Empire.3 Alongside Oracle, Silver Lake has substantial equity in the government-assisted sale of TikTok USA. The firm likely has significant equity in Paramount as well. A Silver Lake Managing Director was added to Paramount’s Board of Directors after the Skydance merger. Immediately therafter, Paramount signed an $8 Billion deal to carry the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which is owned by a company which Silver Lake purchased for $25 Billion earlier this year.4
The connections between Ellison and Silver Lake go all the way back to the firm’s founding, by a former Oracle executive, David Roux, who once described Ellison as “a silver-backed gorilla alpha male.” Ellison was one of the first large investors in Silver Lake and permitted Roux and his partners to use his name when raising their first fund. Ellison has continued to be a cheerleader for many of Silver Lake’s deals, including the leveraged buyout of Dell Technologies via which control of the company was returned to its founder, Michael Dell. Soon thereafter, Dell and Ellison became, as Arik Hesseldahl put it, “the best of friends,” and Dell Technologies started specializing in hardware tailored to Oracle’s enterprise software. Dell happens to be joining Oracle and Silver Lake as a co-investor in the TikTok USA deal.
Though it’s hard to know how much money Ellison has under management by Silver Lake, industry analysts presume he continues to exercise considerable influence over the firm, both as an investor and an advisor to members of the management team, including Durban. After Silver Lake announced the leveraged buyout of video game developer, Electronic Arts (EA), early this month - what will be the largest private equity deal ever, with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner acting as handmaiden5 - Fries wrote in the *The Tokenist, *“In broader terms, EA’s acquisition should be understood as another step in media consolidation, spearheaded by Israeli-aligned Larry Ellison.”
EA is best known for its football simulations, first-person shooters, and fantasy role-playing games, but more than any of EA’s wildly popular gaming franchises, Silver Lake and its co-investors likely covet its data-mining operations. Since 2013, EA has been building one of gaming’s largest and most advanced infrastructures for collecting, warehousing, and analyzing user data. “Once the game is installed on a user’s machine,” Bernard Marr writes in *Big Data In Practice *(2016), “be that a console, phone or PC, it can gather information about that device. If the user connects their social media accounts (to make it easier to play games with friends), it can learn everything they share on there.”
EA holds on to enormous repositories of information about their customers, mined from device logs, as well as from financial micro-transactions, closed-circuit chatrooms and telecoms, and every aspect of gameplay itself, which in some cases can be personalized, micro-targeted, and/or customized by machine-learning.6 Most importantly, EA can quickly develop data profiles which follow gamers to whatever games they play and whichever devices they play on, potentially even beyond the EA ecosystem. As EA’s Global Chief Technology Officer, Rajat Taneja, puts it, “The secret to all of this was changing fundamentally how we thought about identity…capturing all of the events from their phone, from their console or PC, into a single persona - this allows all the data around them to be actioned properly.”
As a fellow portfolio company of Silver Lake, EA is now, just like Qualtrics, best understood as a surveillance operation. As an owner of both companies, Silver Lake is now positioned to synergize these surveillance operations, potentially to connect the unique identifiers of EA gamers to their student records. Not only whether they signed the loyalty oath, but how fast, and how deliberately they engaged the propaganda, can now be “actioned properly” by the Ellison Family Media Empire and its partners.
Fellow Oracle founder and venture capitalist, Kathryn Gould, reported in 2014 that she remembers Larry Ellison telling her, during the period they were working together in the early 1980s, that his favorite book was Matthew Josephson’s *The Robber Barons (1934). Published in the midst of the Great Depression, Josephson intended his book be an explainer of “how we, as a nation, had got into such a mess.” *It was not intended as a roadmap for reviving industrial oligarchy. But, after generations of Cold War historians took to sanding down the rough edges of the Gilded Age business practices to fit the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics, I can appreciate why Ellison would prefer Josephson to Allan Nevins or Francis Fukuyama. What good is studying the robber barons if you cannot learn their dirty tricks?
Josephson traces “how they got their money,” including “a candid description of their most ruthless actions, their conspiracies and their plunderings; for they accepted no ethics of business conduct.” *The Robber Barons *is unflinching in its depiction of the federal spoils system, the municipal political machines, and the selective enforcement of labor and property law, financial regulation, and, at the turn of the century, antitrust.
Josephson concludes his history with a biting critique of Theodore Roosevelt’s idiosyncratic application of the Sherman Antitrust Act. While Roosevelt coveted the reputation of “trust-buster” in public feuds with J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, the magnates who he tussled with in the press always managed to come away from their antitrust persecutions wealthier and more powerful. Josephson regards Roosevelt’s antitrust agenda as actually designed to defang labor organizing and progressive factions in his own party, and simultaneously “conciliate the great industrialists.”
Josephson refines the critique which Mark Twain leveled when he said that Roosevelt “persisted in attacking the symptoms and in letting the disease carefully alone.” And Josephson’s critique was itself further refined by John Kenneth Galbraith, who saw the legacy of Sherman as the creation of a “useful futility” for political theatrics and “a cul-de-sac in which reform can safely be contained.” As economic inequality increases, so does political corruption by the “malefactors of great wealth,” as Roosevelt famously called them, and unfortunately U.S. antitrust has as often been a weapon wielded on behalf of such malefaction as against it.
This sad history is something which should always be front of mind when antitrust is invoked by politicians, as it was earlier this week. Right in the midst of the Ellison-led consolidation spree made possible by kleptocratic weaponization of antitrust’s permission powers, a quartet of GOP senators launched an oversight investigation on the basis of those thorny punishment powers. Were this investigation to lead to actual litigation, its purpose would ostensibly be to break the monopoly of private universities. According to these senators, a cabal of universities may be using “algorithmic collusion” to “maximize their profits or coordinate their pricing, financial aid, and admissions practices.”
There may be more to say about this investigation as it progresses, or it may prove to be little more than a minor and ineffectual incursion in the broader war on Higher Education. Its most substantial revelation, at present, is that these Congressmen regard the aggregation, monetization, and instrumentalization of data across private equity portfolios as a foregone conclusion, as standard practice. It is not the data harvesters they are after. To revive Twain’s metaphor, they are quite content to harass the symptoms - university admissions - while leaving the disease carefully alone.7
Congress is not is not blind to how tech companies and investment funds are creating dark markets of private data for “algorithmic collusion.” Our government takes technofeudalism for granted. The robber barons of the New Gilded Age will built their fiefdoms by extracting attention, enabling addiction, scraping, stealing, and enclosing the data that addiction produces, then selling it back to the individuals and institutions they took to from in the first place as software subscriptions, customized “experiences,” gamified labor, and artificial intelligence. There appears to no broad objection to this from either U.S. political party. What they are currently competing for is the power to appropriate this technofeudal architecture for suppression, indoctrination, and thought policing.
In her column for the New York Times earlier this week, Tressie McMillan Cottom synthesized so much of what has been happening in the weeks since the Paramount Skydance merger laid the foundation for the Ellison Family Media Empire. It has been tempting for many to compare the Ellisons to the Murdochs, and to presume the result of their spending spree will be another flock of partisan news organizations. Cottom recognizes this as a comparably pleasant, lulling illusion. While partisan news in the Murdoch mold has certainly done plenty of harm, it is also a remnant of a media ecosystem which is fast fading. (The average age of a Fox News viewer in 2024, according to Pew Research, was 69.) Partisan news can be metabolized by an American demos. Our news organizations have never really been otherwise.
What has emerged more recently is not simply partisan journalism, but parallel journalism. Entire outlets which exist not, as Fox News or the *New York Post *does, to market news with an ideological framing that appeals to one cross-section of enthusiastic consumers. For parallel journalism, consumer appeal ceases to matter altogether. The outlet imitates existing new organizations, but operates exclusively as a polished publicity machine for the moneyed interests which support it. Any revenue generated by subscriptions or advertising is incidental, and has no impact on framing or editorial positions, which are determined by their service to the political-economic interests of the core businesses of the ownership group.
*The Free Press *was an archetypal parallel journalism publication. But what Cottom recognizes is that the Ellisons are positioning themselves to move not only past partisanship, but also potentially past parallel media, to paragovernmentality, providing a president who already possesses the “direct coercive power of the state” with, as she puts it, “indirect power over communication institutions” in every digital mass media form: television networks, film studios, streaming services, microvideo platforms, console games, enterprise software systems, AI chatbots, news aggregators, and podcast networks.
The U.S. version of paragovernmental media will need to maintain a thin veneer of independence, at least initially, for fear of activating deeply ingrained Sinophobia and Russophobia, but the models for the Ellison Family Media Empire are not so much Fox News or The Free Press, but Russia’s MIA Rossiya Segodnya or the China Media Group.
Both are relatively new operations, at least in their present structure, produced by combinations and consolidations of communist-era state media and globalist-era private media over the course of the 2010s. Whether or not they have yet been successful, these paragovernmental media monoliths are constructed with the ambition of controlling digital A/V content, not only by limiting what residents can access, but also by monitoring, archiving, and analyzing their media habits both for the purpose of identifying potential political dissidents and customizing propaganda.8
The Ellisons’ Frankensteinian Big Brother is stitched together from legacy brands, tech unicorns, shady start-ups, and glorified holding companies. Like the Chinese and Russian precursors, it sits atop a fusion (sometimes confusion) of cable television, Web 2.0, and Generative AI infrastructures. However, unlike the Chinese and Russian models, statist media is not an acculturated fact of American life.
This is a crucial thread of Cottom’s essay. “The merging of state power and economic power around one man who accepts that power as his due,” Cottom contends, “would not be possible without the algorithmic grift that has so all-consumingly captured our attention.” At least as yet, most of us have not been formally conscripted to the data mines, we are there of our own volition, or, at least, we still have some power to break our addictions, or to reject, as the Northwestern protestors have, the indirect coercive powers, to force the monopoly of violence to reveal its true self.
Cottom viscerally captures the creeping Orwellian totalitarianism in her diagnosis, but also, implicitly, nudges us towards one of the pressure points in its technofeudal design. It has not yet fully extricated itself from the sole inalienable right of neoliberalism: the freedom of consumer choice. American kleptocracy is built atop a system of extraction which requires nearly universal and largely voluntary participation in an attention economy activated by mountains of debt. If even a relatively small proportion of American consumer-citizens start canceling their subscriptions, deactivating their accounts, deleting their apps, turning off their screens, not only does the Ellison Family Media Empire find itself hurdling toward insolvency, authoritarianism wilts.
Cottom cautions us against seeing Jimmy Kimmel as the canary in the coal mine, as, for instance, Robert Reich has argued. The failure to get Kimmel’s show canceled, despite a direct threat from the FCC Chairman, shows, once again, that antitrust punishment powers are unreliable, while the organized cancellation of Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions shows how sensitive heavily leveraged media conglomerates are to even moderate declines in revenue. But, while Reich celebrates this as “the great sleeping giant of America awakening,” Cottom chastens us: “We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks.”
I agree. The dollar is no longer the reserve currency of American capitalism. Digital data is. Data strikes are not our only power, but they are an absolutely imperative one. A broad, targeted movement of New Luddism can and will disrupt the conspiracies of capital which are, at present, held together by shrinking margins, nigh-unlimited leverage, speculative euphoria, corporate welfare, algorithmic collusion, broligarchic handshakes of mutually-assured destruction, and octogenarian charisma. Big Brother is still in its Beta phase. We can opt out.
The initial merger announcement was followed rapidly by the cancellation of *The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, *widely reported as a signal to President Trump, and the FCC review required the end of DEI initiatives across the conglomerate and the installment of (neoconservative) “ombudsman” to “monitor bias” at CBS News.
Yarvin has been pleading this case most emphatically ever since Trump was elected, and perhaps most desperately last week, when he wrote not only “the second Trump revolution, like the first, is failing,” but “it deserves to fail…because it spends all its time patting itself on the back.”
Silver Lake entered 2025 as one of the fifteen biggest private equity firms in the world by almost any measure, and will likely end the year inside the top ten, largely because it seems as confident in its immunity from federal oversight as Ellison does.
Durban chairs Endeavor’s Board of Directors for his friend, Endeavor’s co-founder, Ari Emanuel, who also has a long history with the Ellison family, was once Trump’s Hollywood agent and, at least as recently as 2021, the President’s frequent interlocuter. Connie Bruck’s 2021 New Yorker profile of Emanuel is a truly precocious document of our present broligarchy. Among other things, it describes UFC’s pandemic “Fight Island,” the quarantining of which was made possible by the UAE’s “Falcon Eye” surveillance system, which sounds quite a bit like what Larry Ellison has been fantasizing about, though at a much smaller scale.
Durban has been wooing EA’s founder for many years. But the company was too valuable for Silver Lake to finance the deal by itself. Kushner not only took a 5% stake through his boutique fund, Affinity Partners, but helped lure Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which has a large investment in Affinity) to pony up around $30 Billion for EA, which it already owned 10% of.
As Marr puts it, “Everything the player does, from buying the game through the publisher’s digital store, to chatting with their friends using in-game social features, to playing the game itself, leaves a rich data trail.”
Among those who are being asked to participate in the Senate investigation are a series of EdTech companies and education consultancies owned by private equity firms. At least two of them are part of the Vista Equity Partners portfolio which I discussed in the “Philanthrocapitalism U” episode of *American Vandal Podcast *last year, and which has for several years been regarded as likely the industry leader in EdTech investing and monetizing student data. It is reasonable to speculate that among the possible motives of this investigation might be the destruction of the enrollment management software (EMS) business, which might do some harm to firms like Vista, whose Black principle and founder has sometimes been vaguely critical of Trumpism. Such a disruption could create more opportunities for other investors, like Silver Lake, in the student surveillance business. Such would be prototypical of kleptocratic governance.
U.S. intelligence agencies and their adjacent corporations, think tanks, and lobbies, have been obsessing about Russian and Chinese “cognitive infrastructure,” “cognitive warfare,” and “grey zone operations” for at least the last decade. It is difficult sometimes to parse which products of this obsession that trickle into the public sphere are based on intelligence operations and which merely on xenophobic paranoia. In any case, the present administration or either attempting to replicate Chinese and Russian surveillance media monoliths, or using the Sinophobic and Russophobic imaginary to rationalize inventing Big Brother.
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