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Comment by jnmandal | Hacker News Reader

"If it happened there" AKA how the media would cover this happening in another country:

> Powerful oligarch announces bid to gain control of influential media platform

It’s not my impression that the media calls every foreign billionaire an oligarch. i’ve never heard george soros described that way for example. oligarch has a connotation of being highly connected to the government, but the US government often seems actively hostile to Tesla

> the US government often seems actively hostile to Tesla

Literally every company he runs depends heavily on the government for funding. I'm not saying that as an attack - Tesla, SpaceX, and posibly Boring (too soon to tell) provide good products that should be supported by government.

But with that context it's very hard to say that the US government is "hostile".

George Soros is not a foreign billionaire. He's a US citizen as has worked and lived in the US for most of his life.

The more you know. I'd always heard that he was Hungarian, but not that he was Hungarian-American and lives in Katonah, New York. Pretty insane that he has a reputation on the right as a foreign meddler given those facts.

Hm. My dad is a US citizen, born in the US, but grew up in france before he came to live in the US and I think most people would consider him foreign. But I see your point.

Except that he isn't an oligarch, he's an entrepeneur.

I suppose you could argue that he got rich with some support by the government (without the NASA contract SpaceX would not have survived and without the tax credits Tesla would have a hard time, too).

An oligarch refers to the fact that Elon Musk is one of the handful of people in this country with a huge amount of power. Anyone in the top 10 of the Forbes 400 is an oligarch by virtue of being on there, regardless of if they got their money by curing cancer or stealing it from babies.

Another way: oligarch described his current state, not the method of getting there.

Oligarch does not mean "a powerful rich person"

Correct, an oligarch is part of a reigning elite. In any capitalist society where 10 people control more than 1% of the wealth of a country of 360,000,000 , those people are oligarchs. Let's leave aside that the list I describe includes people who control the majority of ecommerce and the internet cloud backend (Bezos), internet discovery (Brin and Page) and frontend (Zuckerberg) and work machines (Gates and Ballmer). 20% of the list is running private space companies to race to take over Mars or at least own space. One is even doing it as a hobby on the side (or was until recently.)

Musk bought a 9.6% chunk of Twitter because people say mean things about him on the internet when he says crazy things. And he's doing it for less than 1% of his net worth. That's an oligarch.

So "it feels right" is your argument here then.. To hell with definitions!

What are you talking about? I started my post with the dictionary definition of an oligarch. A member of a small ruling elite. If you don't think Musks wealth puts him in that class who do you think is an "oligarch". Because Musk has, and had before the invasion, more global power than any Russian oligarch, had more power in almost any western country than a Russian oligarch.

Don't forget the tie-in with a military or political angle. Also "gain control" is rather too tame. You want something more aggressive. Also, must always end with a possible threat whether it makes sense or not.

For russia.

Powerful oligarch loyal to putin seizes control of propaganda platform. Start of propaganda war on american people?

For china.

Powerful tycoon loyal to CCP seizes control of propaganda platform. Greatest threat to american privacy?

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