Murdoch and Musk’s Super Bowl confab gives the game away

The two media billionaires present themselves as very different personalities – in reality their ideals are mostly indistinguishable

Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch were spotted sitting together and chatting at the Super Bowl.

This shouldn’t be that surprising. Murdoch is the owner of Fox and Musk is the owner of Twitter; they’re both in the media industry. And, of course, they’re both obscenely rich. Even after his disastrous tenure at Twitter, Musk is estimated to be the second richest person in the world, with a net worth of around $146 billion. Murdoch has around $19 billion, which makes him the 31^st wealthiest person on earth.

The sighting was newsworthy, though, because the two men have different branding. Murdoch mostly stays out of the spotlight; he’s a typical staid businessman who sits behind the scenes and rakes in cash.

Musk, in contrast, is constantly tweeting; he presents himself as an accessible dude who smokes pot on podcasts and listens to the voice of the people through various twitter polls. “Vox populi, vox Dei!” he likes to say. He’s even claimed to be a socialist.

But while they present themselves differently, Murdoch and Musk are in most respects indistinguishable. Their Super Bowl confab gives the game away. Their public personas may be different, but their ideals are the same. Those ideals being the empowerment of the far right in the name of preserving a status quo in which incredibly wealthy white men like themselves are at the top.

No one doubts Murdoch’s involvement in right wing politics. As owner of Fox, he’s directly responsible for the nation’s primary firehose of reactionary disinformation. Studies have long shown that viewers of Fox are less well-informed than people who watch no news at all. The network’s Covid misinformation and denial led directly to the illness and death of its viewers. The company is currently being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for its egregious role in trying to undermine democracy in support of Donald Trump’s right wing coup attempt.

Murdoch again does little personally to avoid his public image as an oligarch. His network, however, pretends to be populism central. Fox talking heads — millionaires funded by a billionaire — constantly rail against “liberal elites.” They attack Disney for its cautious, half-hearted defence of LGBT people and falsely claim Joe Biden is going to ban steak. Meanwhile, of course, they celebrate Trump’s tax cuts, which shifted huge amounts of money to the ultrawealthy — like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk.

The difference between Musk and Murdoch is that Musk cuts out the middleman. While Murdoch lets his vassals spread conspiracy theories and hate. Musk prefers to take a more direct and active role. He’s directly denounced Democratic proposals to tax billionaires, breathlessly tweeting, “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.”

Musk’s panicked reaction to having to pay more (or virtually any) taxes puts his animosity to Democrats in context. One of his first acts as Twitter CEO was to tweet a vile homophobic conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Musk and Murdoch not infrequently work hand in hand. Musk released cherry-picked Twitter records in order to insinuate that Democrats had inappropriately pressured Twitter to limit the reach of a story about then Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The story was published in the New York Post — a Murdoch paper. Now the Republican controlled House Oversight Committee is staging hearings on the Twitter “revelations” — hearings which have revealed no wrongdoing, but have been obsessively covered by Fox News.

It’s obvious that Murdoch and Musk are coordinating to push garbage conspiracy theories intended to wound Democrats. It’s obvious that, as billionaires who don’t want to be taxed, they share similar interests. And it’s obvious that they have reason to conceal their motives. Taxing billionaires is extremely popular.

Sometimes Musk in particular gets caught up in his own hype and starts to believe he’s more popular than he is. He held a Twitter poll asking if he should step down as CEO. He was apparently shocked when Twitter users enthusiastically told him he should leave and never come back. (Musk simply ignored the poll results of course.)

In general, though, Musk, and especially Murdoch, are more canny. They don’t come out and declare openly that obscenely wealthy white men are better than everyone else and should rule the earth. Instead, they pretend to be on the side of the (white, cishet, male) little guy, fighting against dangerous, nefarious marginalized people. Fox Host Tucker Carlson week after week spews vile slurs and lies about Black people and immigrants. Musk has allowed a slew of banned neo-Nazis to return to Twitter; his tenure has been characterized by a huge spike in racist and antisemitic tweets.

Musk is Murdoch, Murdoch is Musk. They pretend to be slightly different people. But they both benefit from an America awash in hate, in which white male billionaires rule an impoverished and divided nation. Their populism is a fraud; their megalomaniacal dreams of absolute power and zero taxes are all too real. The Super Bowl was a brief, mask-off moment. We should remember it.