Billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Tesla, and SpaceX, has recently started to discuss the possibility of purchasing MSNBC, a North American television network that directly competes with CNN and Fox News in the US political news market.
The speculation started when US President-elect Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the president-elect, tagged Musk in a news article on X on Friday, November 22, 2024, regarding the channel’s sale by Comcast, the massive telecom company that owns MSNBC, CNBC, NBCUniversal, E! Entertainment Television, and USA News.
In response to a user’s question in 2017 about whether he would be interested in purchasing Twitter, the billionaire repeated, “How much does it cost?” Musk paid $44 billion to acquire the network in October 2022 and renamed it X, demonstrating his serious consideration of the question.
From then on, the billionaire became an active userโwith dozens of daily publicationsโand reformed the platform under the banner of free speech, without censorship. By lifting the restrictions that had been imposed on profiles with speeches considered extremist and misleadingโincluding that of Trump, who was expelled from the network after the invasion of the US Capitol in January 2021โhe became an icon of the global right.
Musk played an active role in defending the Republican’s campaign on social media this year. In the White House, he was given a symbolic position as one of the advisors to the Department of Government Efficiency, which is tasked with debureaucratizing the government and the so-called “deep state,” which is the institutional component of the US that endures despite changes in government.
The multinational media corporation NBCUniversal, an entertainment division of Comcast, owns MSNBC, which debuted in 1996 as a “sister channel” to NBC and CNBC.
In a third-quarter audience survey, MSNBC had a total of 889,000 viewers during the day and 1.4 million in prime time. Fox News, further to the right, had 1.5 million and 2.6 million viewers, respectively.
The liberal (which is regarded as progressive in the US) and anti-Trump news programs of MSNBC, NBC, and CNBC are well-known. Programs such as The Rachel Maddow Show, which has been on the air since 2008, are openly critical of the Republican. There is fear of retaliation if Trump returns to the White House.
This is due to the US government’s ability to use the Department of Justice to stop business deals and conventions in the media industry. This is what happened, for example, when AT&T (owner of CNN) tried to buy Time Warner in 2018. Trump played hardball, got the government involved, and thwarted the merger.
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