Pod Insights Prof G Markets What the $100K H-1B Visa Fee Means for Big Tech + TikTok Deal Details Emerge About this episode Ed is joined by Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to unpack the economic impact of Trump’s proposed entry fee for the H-1B visa program. Then, Dan Primack, business editor at Axios, joins the show to break down the latest developments on the TikTok deal, including who will control the algorithm and what the Murdochs’ involvement will be. Ed then breaks down what the updates reveal about who really controls the media.
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Transcript 6,661 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:29 Ed Elson? Today's number: 95. That's how many dollars it costs to get a personalized video message from Nigel Farage on Cameo. The British politician made $180,000 on Cameo last year. That makes him the first politician in history to openly admit what his job actually is. Specifically, saying anything for money.
1:56 Speaker 05 Money markets mad. If money is evil, then that building is hell.
2:00 Speaker 06 The show goes on! The folks in there are watching. Sell, sell!
2:06 Ed Elson? Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is September 23rd. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. A tech-driven rally pushed the major indices to record closing highs. Nvidia led the way, climbing 4% on plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI. The dollar fell, breaking a three-day rally. Meanwhile, gold reached another record. And finally, BYD shares dropped 4% on news that Berkshire Hathaway has fully exited its stake in the Chinese electric vehicle maker. Okay, what else is happening? President Trump announced a big change to the H1B visa program, specifically
2:49 Ed Elson? an entry fee. In order to attain an H1B to live and work in America, you must now pay $100,000. To put that into perspective, the fee to enter the H1B lottery used to be $5,000. That lottery will now be replaced by a, quote, "weighted selection process that favors the highest-paid positions." In sum, we are about to see a huge decline in H1B workers. Now, a quick reminder, what is the H1B visa? Well, this is a program that goes back to the H.W. Bush administration. It was designed to attract highly skilled workers, people with specialty knowledge, engineers, software developers, computer scientists.
3:33 Ed Elson? And the idea was to bring the world's best and brightest into the country and have them build value for American companies versus foreign companies. And indeed, that is exactly what happened. Some of our greatest entrepreneurs, our greatest business people, came to the US on the H1B. People like Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, or Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, Jeffrey Skoll, the president of eBay, and most notably Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla.
4:04 Ed Elson? Yes, Elon was able to stay in America thanks to an H1B. Without it, we wouldn't have Tesla or SpaceX or Neuralink, or at least they wouldn't exist in the US. And in fact, Elon has recognized this fact. Just last year, he wrote, quote, "The reason I'm in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong, is because of the H1B." Quote, "I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend." Well, I guess he did go to war. He donated nearly $300 million to the Trump campaign, but it turned out to be more of a war against himself. The H1B hasn't been eliminated per se,
4:47 Ed Elson? but it has definitely been put way out of reach for many, many workers. After this change, H1B issuance is expected to plummet this year. And that makes sense, considering the average H1B worker earns about $94,000 a year, which is less than the entry fee you'd have to pay to even make that salary in the first place. Now, why is Trump doing this? Well, the idea is to encourage companies to hire American workers instead of foreign workers. And that is fair enough. But we should also note that this is quite a reversal from Trump's previous position on skilled immigration, which he promoted throughout the campaign.
5:31 Ed Elson? One of his promises, for example, was to give a green card to every foreign student who graduates from an American college. This is a clip from an interview on the All In Podcast.
5:44 Speaker 07 We need high skilled workers in this country.
5:46 Speaker 08 Yes.
5:46 Speaker 07 We need to recruit the best and brightest from the world.
5:49 Speaker 08 I agree.
5:50 Speaker 07 Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America?
5:57 Speaker 08 I do promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promise, otherwise I wouldn't promise. It's so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this, but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came. And you know, sort of dominated for a little while, as you perhaps know. But what I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college. I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country. And you know more stories than I do, but I know of stories where people graduated from a top college
6:42 Speaker 08 or from a college and they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can't. They go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multi billionaires employing thousands and thousands of people. And it could have been done here.
6:59 Ed Elson? That was in June twenty twenty four, so before the election. And here we are a little over a year later. Not only has that position been abandoned, it has also essentially been reversed with this H one B move. So what does this mean for our economy? What does it mean for tech, which is of course highly reliant on foreign skilled work? Well, here to help us answer that, we have Peter Harrell from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also served in the National Security Council and the National Economic Council under President Biden.
7:38 Ed Elson? Okay, Peter Harrell, thank you for joining me on the program.
7:41 Speaker 09 Ed, it's great to be on.
7:42 Ed Elson? So Trump has issued this new entry fee. If you want to get an H one B, you got to pay a hundred thousand dollars. A lot of implications for the economy, especially for big tech. But first, I just want to get your initial reactions. What are kind of your, your initial thoughts? What are the implications of this move?
8:01 Speaker 09 Yeah, so this is a big move out of the administration. Obviously, the administration has taken a tough on immigration set of policies across the board. But this is really the first time they seem to be moving against sort of high skill immigration as opposed to, you know, more blue collar kind of immigration, people crossing, crossing the border. Clearly going to have implications for the tech sector. The tech sector is the biggest user of these visas, which basically let people with higher skilled professional qualifications come to the US for between one and six years to work in specialty fields. Clearly going to have implications for the tech sector.
8:45 Speaker 09 But that's not the only sector that this is going to hit. Although we think about H1Bs as being some of the big tech platform companies, as well as startups. Elon Musk was famously an H1B early in his career when he was getting some of his early companies started. It is also used by doctors, hospitals to bring specialty doctors in. It's used by universities and nonprofits to bring policy researchers and academic researchers into the United States. Well, it's probably over half a tech story. It's by no means only a tech story for employers here in the United States.
9:28 Ed Elson? Just want to read you a quote from Reed Hastings, who's of course the founder of Netflix, who actually supported this move. He said, quote, "I've worked on H1B politics for 30 years. Trump's $100,000 per year tax is a great solution. It will mean H1B is used just for very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed and more certainty for those jobs." What are your reactions to his view that this is actually a good thing? What is the economic argument as to why putting on this $100,000 entry fee would actually be good for companies, for tech companies and for the economy?
10:06 Speaker 09 Yeah, so I think there are a couple of arguments in favor of this move. And I should begin by saying, you know, watching the Trump administration over the last, what are we, eight months, nine months now, Ed? I think this is probably in some sense a move that was driven by, A, Trump being tough on immigration and B, this is a president who shows he wants to look for money wherever he can find it, right? And this is a chance for him to get some additional revenue for the US government. So that's probably what's driving. But but what are the kind of positive policy rationales potentially for this move? Or what are the potential upsides? Well, the first is although the H1B program started back in the early 1990s,
10:48 Speaker 09 was intended to bring a diverse range of high skilled workers to the United States. There is some evidence, and this is, I think, what Mr. Hastings is talking about. There is some evidence that over the last decade or so, a handful of relatively large tech companies has figured out how to run the system in a way that benefits them. So if you look at the list of who the largest users of H1B visas are, you know, it is a couple of the big tech platform companies like Amazon. And then it's a couple of the Indian IT outsourcing companies that have used this to get workers to come to the US. And so, you know, there are a number of these companies
11:33 Speaker 09 that are getting several thousand of these visas per year each. And so I think there is an argument that the for the tech users of this visa, extracting a fee from them will probably force them to focus their hiring under H1B on higher value employees rather than on kind of middle value employees. And I see the argument there for that. Now, that is not an argument for the NGO users, the small business users, the kind of non-big tech platform users, who I think will find a hundred thousand dollar fee
12:15 Speaker 09 makes the difference between their ability to bring in talent that they want to bring in and their their, you know, their ability to bring that talent in or not. You know, I think the hospital, this is this is a major issue for them. Maybe less of an issue for Amazon or Infosys, which may decide they they eat some of the fee here. We'll see.
12:35 Ed Elson? Yeah, I mean, it goes back to why do we have the H1B in the first place? And the whole idea is it's to make us competitive, competitive in technology and engineering, competitive in all of the highly skilled work sectors. But we're in the middle of this AI race, especially with China. And you compare this to Trump's stance, basically just a year ago, where he seemed to be very pro skilled immigration. There was at one point, he was saying that he wanted to give green cards to any foreign student who graduated from a US university. It appeared that it was his view that in order to be competitive in technology, we
13:16 Ed Elson? need to do whatever we can to attract as much skilled talent as we can from abroad. And it appears that this is going to reverse that, or at least that's how it appears on its face. I'm just wondering what you think of that? Is this going to hamper our ability to compete on AI and in technology at large?
13:37 Speaker 09 Well, so it probably is and it isn't. It probably is not going to hamper Meta Platforms' ability to bring in an engineer it wants to bring in, because we've seen the reports that Zuck is spending, what, $100 million to buy an engineer, an extra $100K for the visa, probably isn't going to be dispositive to what Zuck wants to do. But where I think it will be harmful will be on more of the upstart AI companies, more companies that are trying to get their feet off the ground, who already find this H1B system to be extremely complicated to navigate, and who now are going to have to come up
14:20 Speaker 09 with $100,000 of cash on top of all that complexity and legal fees. And so I think in a way, what you're going to see is a system that some of the existing big tech guys will be kind of, okay, fine, we'll bring in a couple of people we really want to bring in, we'll eat the cost. We may not bring in some of the mid-scale, lower mid-scale people. But we otherwise would have brought in. But I do worry the real losers here are going to be the startups, the folks who were bringing in Elon when Elon was a kid, for whom this is real money. And that, of course, has historically been a big part of American innovation. And the administration's going to need to think about that part of the ecosystem
15:04 Speaker 09 if they don't want to cede our innovative edge to our competitors.
15:09 Ed Elson? Yes, one really interesting stat here that I did not realize, but three quarters of H1B workers are from India. It used to be kind of more diverse, more balanced a while ago, but it's now 75% will bring in people from India. So wondering, to what extent does this affect our relationship with India? And given what we've seen in terms of these tensions, especially with tariffs over the past few weeks, I wonder if it's possible that this is really targeted at India in some way. Does this affect our relationship with the nation?
15:46 Speaker 09 So it certainly has affected our relationship in the sense that we saw Indian markets get a little bit rattled after this announcement. We've seen obviously concern out of Indian political leadership. You know, I'll be very interested to see whether this issue plays into the US-India trade negotiations. And I have no inside information as to whether that's happening. But one thought I did have when I saw this news breaking on Friday and through the weekend was, you know, there's a provision buried in the executive order that basically says, yes, we're having this $100,000 cap or this $100,000 fee. But the Secretary of Homeland Security can waive that fee
16:32 Speaker 09 for classes of immigrants or for individual immigrants or for firms if the secretary decides that she wants to.
16:41 Speaker 09 And one thought I had is, you know, would the Trump administration tell the Indians as part of the trade negotiations, you know, hey, we'll give you 20,000 free H1Bs if we get to yes on the trade deals. Again, I have no inside information on that, but that is an option they seem to have legally given themselves, given this kind of broad exception they have created for the broad potential exception they've created for themselves. But it is clearly going to be an issue in the US-India relationship.
17:12 Ed Elson? Just want to get your view on the impetus for this. As I mentioned earlier, a year ago, he seemed to have almost the opposite stance on this issue of skilled immigration. And now it appears to be reversing. I'm wondering, what is the reason for this? Why have they pursued this strategy? What is it hoping to accomplish? Who's in his ear? Or perhaps he came up with this on his own. But why do you think he is doing this when you get down to it?
17:46 Speaker 09 Well, I think that this combines two things we know Trump is interested in. One is a tough line on immigration, right? This just lets him look tough on immigration, where he can say previously was free, or not really free, but a few thousand dollars, now it's a hundred thousand dollars. So I think he likes the messaging of toughness, even if there are some policy downsides. And second, I do think it's about the money. You know, this is a guy we see, whether it is the Nvidia rev share deal for chips to chip sales to China, or whether it is taking equity in Intel. This is a guy who's looking for kind of odd sources of government revenue somewhere. And I think this was kind of
18:29 Speaker 09 a, you know, an issue that let him combine both those interests. He can appear tough on immigration, and he can claim he's getting money for the federal government. And I don't think you have to overthink that with this particular president.
18:42 Ed Elson? Yeah. The other thing we saw is this roll up of the Trump, the gold card visa program. You can now pay a million dollars to live in the U.S. Just wondering if you had any reactions to that move and perhaps what the economic implications of that program will be.
18:57 Speaker 09 I mean, we'll have to see the economic implications of that program, but I do, the fact that he announced the Trump gold card and the H1B reform or the H1B fee on the same day, you're reinforced in my mind that the money was a piece of this H1B policy, right? I mean, he's looking for ways to raise money through immigration. So the gold card basically is, you know, an expedited visa, green card for high net worth individuals coming to the, to the U.S. who are willing to pay a million dollars. We've, we've previously had policies where, you know, immigrants who are investing a
19:37 Speaker 09 lot of money here in the U.S., so it's, it's not conceptually all that different from the past, except A, named after the president, B, the money is being paid to the government rather than being invested in communities in the United States.
19:53 Ed Elson? Right.
19:53 Speaker 09 And C, you know, really just seems to be a visa for sale kind of system that we've often criticized other governments, other governments for adopting. Whether it works, I think we'll just have to see what the demand is. I mean, you know, Trump says we might do 80,000 of these a year, I think is what he said. I'll have to see if there's demand for that out there.
20:16 Ed Elson? All right, Peter Howell, really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us on the show.
20:20 Speaker 09 Thank you so much for having me on, Ed.
20:24 Ed Elson? After the break, an inside look at the latest developments at TikTok. If you're enjoying the show, give Prof G Markets a follow.
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22:12 Ed Elson? We're back with Prof G Markets. The White House has unveiled new details on the TikTok deal. The deal is completely finalized, according to White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt. Oracle will oversee the retraining of the app's algorithm, which it will lease from ByteDance. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Trump said that Michael Dell and the Murdoch family could take part in the deal. And as we covered previously, a group of American investors will own roughly 80% of the new entity, as well as hold six out of seven of the board seats. That leaves ByteDance with less than 20% of the equity in the new business. Okay. For an inside look at these developments, our producer Claire Miller spoke with Dan Primack,
22:57 Ed Elson? business editor at Axios and author of the daily Axios Pro Rata newsletter. He has been in touch with a senior White House official, and he's also been in touch with someone who is personally involved in this deal.
23:08 Speaker 11 Let's start with the core issue of the algorithm. Last week, there was talk of licensing it from ByteDance. Now there's talk of leasing a copy of it, and that Oracle will secure it somehow. Seems like a lot of semantics. What is going on with the algorithm from your understanding?
23:28 Speaker 12 Yeah, so there's going to be what they're calling a lease. So basically, a copy of the TikTok algorithm will get made. ByteDance will retain the original algorithm. That copy will go to what they're calling TikTok US, which is going to be controlled by Silver Lake and Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz and other US investors. And at that point, that copy, they're going to be able to retrain and also continue to modify it. And the best way I can kind of describe this is, imagine someone made a drawing and made a photocopy for you. They would hold on to the original drawing, but you could do whatever you wanted with the photocopy. You could draw additional things. You could fold it. You could change the color, et cetera. And that would be yours. And the reason for this arrangement is basically that ByteDance is going to continue to operate TikTok in countries outside of the US.
24:11 Speaker 12 So it still needs access to the algorithm as well.
24:14 Speaker 11 So what is Oracle's role here?
24:17 Speaker 12 Oracle's basically the tech partner. And this isn't new. You know, Trump tried to ban TikTok during, at the end of his first term, at which point Oracle popped up as the tech partner. And even after that, the beginning of the Biden administration, Oracle was working with TikTok on something called Project Texas. Oracle basically is two things. It's the tech partner. It's the one that's going to retrain the algorithm. It's the one that provides the data security. You basically sit on Oracle Cloud. And then also, Oracle's going to be an equity investor in TikTok US, one of the three managing partners, I guess you could say, of this new company.
24:47 Speaker 11 All of this new information has been coming from the White House. Has Beijing weighed in here? Because last week, it seemed like... China was basically saying ByteDance would hold on to the algorithm and license it. It seems like they were not on the same page going into that phone call with Trump.
25:03 Speaker 12 I don't know how much distinction between the term license and lease there really is. I think it's a similar sort of thing. The official readout from the Chinese government was a lot more vague, or at least a little bit more circumspect. And what's unknown is, is that because there actually is some daylight between the two? Or was that a bit of an attempt to save face by the Chinese government? The White House, granted, they have made promises in the past on things that haven't come to fruition, but they've been pretty consistent on this for the past several days. That China, during the meeting in Madrid, approved of this during a call with Trump and Xi, they signed off and that there's going to be actual paperwork signed shortly.
25:42 Speaker 11 I wanted to ask about that. Is this really a framework or is there a deal? Your sense is there is actual paperwork and a signature is incoming?
25:50 Speaker 12 I think there's probably two parts. There's probably some sort of memorandum of understanding, which would be the framework, and then the actual, all the details have to get finalized. As of this morning, a senior White House official was acknowledging that the final price isn't necessarily determined yet. The final cap table for TikTok US, i.e. who all the investors are and what stake they'll all own, that's not entirely determined yet. And even potentially, the US government is not going to take equity, they're not going to have a board seat or have a so-called golden share, but they are going to get the equivalent of kind of a banker fee for this, a finder's fee, and that doesn't seem to even be determined yet. So I think memorandum of understanding, but then Trump is signing a new executive order to kind of kick the can another four months. There's a bunch of time to actually paper over the final deal, and it's possible nothing
26:35 Speaker 12 official will be signed until the final closing paperwork.
26:38 Speaker 11 Do you have any sense of what these deal terms might look like, what the pricing could be?
26:43 Speaker 12 Honestly, I don't. You know, the talk has been all over the place. What complicates this is a couple of things. For starters, ByteDance's value to kind of over, I believe, $300 billion in the private market, or maybe 250 or something like that. But TikTok is a relatively small part of its business. On the other hand, this isn't just a pure, okay, it makes this much money and thus you put a multiple on it. There's so much political leverage here on both sides of this, right? You kind of have a distressed seller to a certain extent because if a deal doesn't happen, TikTok gets shut down. On the other hand, China obviously doesn't want to let it go for peanuts because that makes them look bad. So I think that the numbers are a little bit complicated to figure out. The only thing we really know for sure is that ByteDance and its investors will own just
27:26 Speaker 12 under 20% of TikTok US if this goes through.
27:29 Speaker 11 You use the phrase save face that ByteDance wanted to save face or China wanted to save face by calling it a licensing deal. Do you see this deal as a loss for China?
27:42 Speaker 12 I mean, it's a loss for China in the sense that one of its giant tech companies has been getting pushed around, sure. I think it's a loss in that. Now, look, if it turns out that it's for a trillion dollar valuation, then I'll reconsider. But right now, sure, it's a loss, right? You know, this is not the sort of thing that China wants to see one of its companies have to do. ByteDance originally had no interest in selling TikTok. Again, it's not the main part of its business, but it's a nice crown jewel in its portfolio.
28:08 Speaker 11 Over the weekend, Trump said that the Murdochs and Michael Dell are involved. Do you have any intel on that?
28:13 Speaker 12 It's true, and it's kind of shorthand. In terms of Michael Dell, his family office a couple of years ago merged with an investment bank slash private equity firm called BDT. So there's now this firm, you can Google it, it's called BDT plus MSD Capital, I think, or something like that. That's the one who's working on this. So it's partially Michael Dell's money. There's also other money. And then when it comes to the Murdochs, Lachlan and Rupert, and this is of course ironic because Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch as part of a lawsuit with the Wall Street Journal, but that's going to get done apparently via Fox Corp, the actual company. So it's not Lachlan and Rupert reaching into their personal checkbooks. This is being done through the company.
28:49 Speaker 11 Would you say that's the same, the same structure applies for Oracle and Larry Ellison? Or do you have any sense of whether Larry will be personally involved in this deal?
28:59 Speaker 12 Unclear right now. Oracle, again, is interesting because they've been involved with TikTok and ByteDance for so long and went back in 2019 when there was first talk of divestiture. Oracle considered being an equity partner, then didn't want to be, then it was, then it wasn't, and now it seems like it's going to be an equity partner yet again. It's unclear right now if this will just be Oracle money or if Larry Ellison will put some of his own in, although he could also contribute some Oracle shares, which is kind of the same thing.
29:23 Speaker 11 When I think about where it seems like this app is headed into the hands of Investors, including the Murdochs and the Ellison's. I think about what happened with X or Twitter when Elon took over. Advertisers fled, users fled, users dropped off. Do you see TikTok going in the same direction? Like, will Americans stay on this app?
29:51 Speaker 12 Well, Americans have been told for the past five years that the Chinese government controls this and that they're watching everywhere you go. And Americans keep flocking to the app. So I'm not sure Americans necessarily really care. I think so long as the performance of the app continues to be good. I think that was a bigger issue with X slash Twitter. Remember with X slash Twitter, Elon Musk came in and he fired everybody. And he wanted to change it. That was the point, right? He wanted to buy it, not just to control it, but to make significant changes. There's no indication here that what Silver Lake or Oracle or Andreessen Horowitz want to do. I think they think it's a decent business that they could make better, perhaps. And that this is a good opportunity for them. You know, Elon talked so much about, you know, bots were ruining Twitter, et cetera. No one's suggesting that the underlying algorithm has any problems with it. In fact, I believe the buyers feel that it is a more addictive algorithm than, you know,
30:36 Speaker 12 than Instagrams or X's. So I don't believe you're going to see the same thing. We don't know necessarily who would run TikTok US. But that will be up to Andreessen Oracle, et cetera. I wouldn't be surprised if the current management of that company, which is based in the United States, continues to manage it, at least for the most part. I think it's worth noting, there's still some people who are kind of, who are involved in the deal on both sides, who are still a little bit in the dark. There's a lot to still be determined. And what I'd say is, I wrote a column about this today in the Axios Pro Rata newsletter, and at the very end of it, it basically said, "The deal's not done till it's done." And somebody who was pretty heavily involved in the deal wrote back and said that from their perspective, that's probably the most accurate statement that could be made about the situation right now. So there's a lot of kind of trust but verify here.
31:21 Speaker 12 There is a framework, but really, this has been so complicated. And this honestly kind of gone on for five years or six years, until it's really done. And all the paperwork is signed and everyone gets to walk away with their cash. There isn't yet a TikTok deal.
31:35 Speaker 11 I mean, there's been a flurry of news on this in the past week. Do you think we're still four months out, you know, based on that extended deadline?
31:45 Speaker 12 I think we could be. I mean, look, these these kinds of transactions, this is basically a corporate carve out, right? And these sorts of transactions, even with no controversy or political overtones, just take a bunch of time to get done. There's just a lot of paperwork and things that need to get done. The only, by the way, the the only kind of caveat I would say to all this, or not even a caveat, but like thing to watch is, this has been used, TikTok has been used as a trade bargaining chip by both the US and by Beijing. That deal between the two countries still isn't signed. We're talking here about a lease of an algorithm. A lease can be canceled, potentially, even if the deal closes, right? You know, you know, they they could cancel the the contract, or maybe it's not in perpetuity. So there's still some kind of outstanding things there that that could become, you know, monkeys in the wrench.
32:29 Speaker 11 All right. Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
32:31 Speaker 12 Thanks for having me.
32:32 Ed Elson? That was Dan Primack, business editor at Axios and author of the daily Axios Pro Rata newsletter. Well, on Monday's episode, we discussed the rise of the Ellison family, their takeover of media from Paramount to Warner Brothers and potentially TikTok. We discussed how this is becoming a trend, how billionaires, and in many cases, pro-Trump billionaires, are spending their billions to buy up and control the largest media assets in the world. And this news essentially just reemphasizes what we already said. It won't just be Larry Ellison and Jeff Yass, two of Trump's closest associates controlling TikTok.
33:12 Ed Elson? It will also be, perhaps, Rupert Murdoch, the mastermind behind Fox News. Those are the people who will own the most ascendant social media asset in the world. Those are the people who will own the app from which one third of young Americans get their news. Those are the people who will have a direct impact on the minds of 170 million Americans, basically the largest audience in the country. But this also highlights something larger, and that is this question of who owns the media? I mean, for a long time, it was thought that the left owned the media, the liberal media, the establishment left, the leftist mainstream.
33:55 Ed Elson? These are ideas, these are terms that have been thrown around a lot and that still are thrown around a lot. Many people still say and believe that the mainstream media is captured by the left. But let's just be clear. If ever that was true, there is no longer any doubt. The right controls the media, whether it is TV, where Fox News commands three times the viewership of MSNBC, or podcasts, where all the biggest shows are pro-Trump, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, or tech, where the most influential social media platforms are controlled by people who are friends with
34:39 Ed Elson? the president or who have donated to the president X, Instagram, Facebook, and now potentially TikTok, to be owned by the Ellison's and, yes, the Murdochs. There is not one corner of American media that isn't captured or controlled by the right at this point. Now, that isn't to say that the same wasn't true at one point of the left. The left certainly has had its fair share of media control. But it is to say that that is no longer true. This idea, this complaint that the left controls the media, it's just no longer
35:19 Ed Elson? a valid complaint. It does not compute with reality. That isn't a value judgment. That isn't a stance on what's right or what's wrong. It is simply a statement of what is. The right controls the government. The right controls the law. And in 2025, the right controls the media. So this story of the underdog or the silenced or the suppressed, I'm sorry, it doesn't work anymore. This is a story of the powerful. This is a story of the dominant. And ultimately, this is a story of total and complete control.
36:01 Ed Elson? Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our research team is Dan Shalane, Isabella Kinsel, Kristin O'Donohue and Mia Silverio. And our technical director is Drew Burrows. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow.
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