million was it 24 million to it was

45 million but you know whatever um it's you know it's uh more money than i have i guess um and uh and they uh it's also financed by uh by middle eastern countries and the um federal communications commission put a special exception in their foreign ownership rules so that saudis the uh emiratis qatar uae could um could put the money in to allow David Ellison to buy CNN and the rest of the...

Now, just to tell you about the case, right? So there's a law called the Clayton Act, which says that mergers that, quote unquote, may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly are illegal.

And that's a pretty vague...

It's a vague thing to say, may substantially lessen competition, but there's a lot of precedent.

Typically, what that means is if you have a concentrated industry... that's been consolidating, which this is, that's presumptively illegal.

There's a lot of other things like if you can screw workers or creators or suppliers, which they can now presumptively.

Give me your reaction.

What incentive do they have?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different possibilities here.

It is hard to talk about because it's so strange, but there really is a cult behind a lot of this.

It's the effective altruism people saying, I'm not saying that there aren't incentives, because there are.

We'll get into some of them.

But I do think it's important to start with the point that there is some sincerity from the people who believe this stuff.

They really do believe in these ghost stories.

Yeah.

What killed it, and when exactly did we lose the plot?

Yeah.

So in your intro, you said we never solved it, but we did.

I was just gonna-- It was a good intro, but other than that, we did solve.

The, the, the New Deal era was about breaking the power of private oligarchs running our economy, what FDR called the informal economic government of the United States, which I always love that quote.

It also makes you seem smarter if you quote dead people.

Um, so, uh, we-- I- what, what happened, and it's really weird, right? To think about this tradition.

Um, w- what do you think?

How unusual, put into perspective for us, how unusual is Trump's amassed income to say members of Congress or former presidents actually of either party?

Well, I think it is unprecedented.

I mean, there's no way to talk about to characterize it as as there's no comparison because no one's ever done anything like it.

But I want to offer some context, which is that this isn't just about this isn't just Trump's doing.

This is also a result of the Supreme Court a few years ago saying that the president is above the law.

So they had a decision, I think it was Trump v.

United States, where they said that if the president is exercising, quote, unquote, his core constitutional authorities, he cannot be held liable for what he's doing.

What do you make of this about face that he's done on crypto?

But can, can you paint a little bit more of a picture of, of how this has been part of the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, um, over the past few years?

Why does this, uh, why does this encourage authoritarianism? So, like, first I wanna make another...

I wanna double down on something Zephyr said, which is that this tr- these traditions, and there's multiple anti-monopoly traditions, they're not about antitrust law.

They're not just about how we regulate these corporations.

There are, you could see in the data center revolts, right? That is a very traditional land reform movement.

That is an opposition to the closing of the commons.

You know, you could go back to Henry George.

Is there a difference here that's, like, worth teasing out? Or is it, like, we're all on the same side against, against big corporations and corporate power, and we don't need to be even talking about this?

But can, can you paint a little bit more of a picture of, of how this has been part of the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, um, over the past few years?

Why does this, uh, why does this encourage authoritarianism? So, like, first I wanna make another...

I wanna double down on something Zephyr said, which is that this tr- these traditions, and there's multiple anti-monopoly traditions, they're not about antitrust law.

They're not just about how we regulate these corporations.

There are, you could see in the data center revolts, right? That is a very traditional land reform movement.

That is an opposition to the closing of the commons.

You know, you could go back to Henry George.

Is there a difference here that's, like, worth teasing out? Or is it, like, we're all on the same side against, against big corporations and corporate power, and we don't need to be even talking about this?

What's the solve?

Yeah, I think the answer is politics, and I know that's not necessarily satisfying.

But regulators for a really long time, maybe 40 years, have been just kind of giving away these rates of return to utilities because no one has really been paying attention or putting political pressure on them.

And over the last few years, the political pressure has started.

So when Governor Josh Shapiro, who has a lot of influence over these regulators, starts saying, "Look, this is a problem," and you see this in other areas.

I mean, you, you have legislation at a state level in, in Pennsylvania and New York.

Uh, you have pressure in California.

Uh, how do, uh, how do you, how do you put that into this mix?

Yeah.

Um, there, there...

But there is an, uh, there is an element here of there was a significant change and the capital markets felt it.

You can't just say, "Oh, it didn't happen.

But they didn't, they didn't really succeed.

They didn't really do anything." Like, Wall Street was very mad, and they were mad for a reason.

But I, I wanna get to something that you talked about in terms of populism, because you're saying, like, pop- populism is not a very good guide for what to do or for how to organize, um, you know, uh, legal cases.

Like, that's an awesome amount of power, and that was very much core to, at least as I understood it, the Antitrust Reform Project.

Yeah.

Um, there, there...

But there is an, there is an element here of there was a significant change, and the capital markets felt it.

You can't just say, "Oh, it didn't happen.

But they didn't, they didn't really succeed.

They didn't really do anything." Like, Wall Street was very mad, and they were mad for a reason.

But I, I wanna get to something that you talked about in terms of populism, because you're saying, like, pop-populism is not a very good guide for what to do or for how to organize, um, you know, uh, legal cases.

Like, that's an awesome amount of power, and that was very much core to, at least as I understood it, the Antitrust Reform Project.

I'd love to hear from you in your own words if you could kind of describe what you're trying to do with your work and your journalism, what you feel like the, the sort of core problem is that you're focusing on in our country, and, and why you feel like it's such an important beat.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

So there's a s- there's a small group of people...

Well, you started by saying it's hard to parse and figure out, and that's intentional, right? That there's a reason for that.

So there's a small group of people that control, to oversimplify, all the money and power in the world, right? And these are the people that control, uh, and effectively govern our society, and they do it through these things called corporations.

And when you have a corporation that has a large share of a market, and they can control what gets bought, what gets sold, who works for them, who doesn't in that market, they're effectively like a mini dictator of a market, right? They're a dictator of a market versus a market where you have lots of competition, um, then there's no one entity that's in control, or you might have a public entity setting rules, and they're more in control, or they're democratically elected.

So really what I work on, um, and the way to understand monopolies is, and, and market power, corporate power in general, is that it's, it's a, it's a way that we talk about our political system, but we do it by talking about finance and money and charts and nerd stuff.

Are you getting the sense that this is becoming sort of a more mainstream and less kind of like nerdy niche topic right now? Like where is the, the momentum and the spirit around this debate in your view, having been in it for so long?

It's like you don't get to use your monolo- monopolistic power to simply extract as much as you possibly can from, uh, from your, from your customers and your clients.

Yeah.

So this is a jury trial, which means that the law, it's not like the case law isn't gonna necessarily change that much, but that's not what's important.

What's important here is that this is actually a signal to everyone in corporate America.

Just as when the Obama administration approved the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster and no one did anything about it for 16 years, and, you know, when Pearl Jam before that in the 1990s, no one did anything about that.

That was a signal to corporate America anything goes.

And so now it's, if you're a CEO and you, you're asking, "Hey, can I do this thing? Can I overcharge for this or overcharge for that, or can I coerce in this way or that way?" Your lawyer has to tell you, "Well, there was this Ticketmaster verdict, and so you're gonna have it, that in your mind when you make these decisions." And that's how these things actually really change.

You fought the good fight, you finished the race, and you kept the faith." I, I guess there's also a message when you say midterms all the way up back to government to say, "Hey, you can, you can let these things play out at jury trials, or you can actually take the enforcement, uh, authority that you have and, and do this first and be ahead of the, uh, the people."

Somehow, um, the, the, the-- people get money from corporations, and corporations get an easy go of it when they're trying to do things that are counter to the interests of the American people.

Yeah, we have a corruption crisis, and the oligarchy that people dislike, the, the hatred of what powerful individuals are doing, the concentration of power in the hands of, of a few is a, is a direct result of, of this corruption.

I mean, you-- W- w-- You know, the specifics of each case, whether it's Hewlett-Packard or Compass Anywhere, they're pretty boring.

But the point is, it's about people extracting in e- in individual markets.

And markets, whether it's, you know, Wi-Fi systems, which is what, um, was what Hewlett-Packard was selling, or, you know, real estate brokerage systems or, or, you know, which is with Compass Anywhere, or ticketing, this, this is the guts of the economy, and when you consolidate power in one of those markets, you are generating inequality.

You are generating more oligarchy.

And if you do it across enough markets, that's what you have.

This, these, these little ways in which you steal money from people add up.

Yep

... which is run by someone who is near a billionaire, maybe a billionaire.

And when that happened, the stock popped by seven percent, and the CEO, who is the largest shareholder, his net worth pretty dramatically increased.

And a, a different example would be Paramount is now trying to buy Warner, and that is gonna lead to huge layoffs.

There's all sorts of political scandals about it.

But the CEO of Warner Brothers, David Zaslav, is gonna earn five hundred to six hundred million dollars in the transaction and become a billionaire.

So it's not just that, oh, sad people are becoming wealthy and these policies help increase, you know, their wealth.

I mean, it's thought of as economics, but you, you discuss how monopoly is a democratic problem.

But legally speaking, under the relevant antitrust monopoly suits, what exactly is it that Ticketmaster is doing that renders their conduct illegal? And just give a little bit of background about how this came, case came, came to be, the one that, that the Trump administration and the DOJ tried yesterday to settle.

Yeah.

I should also say that there's a, there's another part of the, of the cost, which is, you know, I think a lot of people remember the Taylor Swift fiasco, where, you know, a lot of people were looking forward to seeing Taylor Swift and then, um, they got, you know, text messages or emails saying, "Tickets are available, and you've got one reserved," and they tried to reserve one, and the whole system crashed.

And it was a, it was a total mess.

People spent days to try to get their tickets.

Oftentimes they would see a price of $100, then it would go to $1,000.

It was just like a total disaster.

How does that look in terms of whether that's going to succeed and, and they're gonna get a similar kind of, you know, positive treatment as Ticketmaster just got, or whether there really will be this institutional momentum that takes off and continues to really put the screws on them for their monopolistic practices?

It's where companies involved in large mergers submit information to the government even before a deal is finalized.

You have to tell the government if, "Hey, we wanna merge," and you have to give the government a bunch of information.

And then the government has 30 days to look at that information, and if they want more, they can ask you for more in what's called a second request.

It means that it already sent over extensive documentation to the Justice Department, paperwork that Matt says can take over a year to pull together.

At least to me, it indicates that they feel very confident that the Trump administration is not gonna challenge this merger, no matter what they find, and they wanna close it really quickly so that the other potential entities that might challenge it, which is to say state-level enforcers who are Democrats, can't bring a challenge in time to stop the closing.

It's a very savvy political move.

It's very insider-y.

It's very, it's kind of nerd stuff.

Now, e- let's assume that gets em- codified into law or gets upheld by the courts, would that be really a mechanism for keeping prices lower? I mean, would pharmaceutical companies just jack up prices in the rest of the world or, w- do you think that is an effective way to deal with high pharmaceutical products p- prices?

Well, so that is, the, that is the idea that Trump, Trump, Trump's argument and it's an argument from a number of, of, um, of economists as well is that America pays too much for drugs to subsidize the rest of the world.

So the idea is high prices generate high profits which then the pharmaceutical companies pu- like plow back into research and you need that money to discover drugs and so you're either gonna get it from the US or you're gonna get it from foreigners and they've been getting it from the US and so what we need to do is lower prices here and raise prices abroad and that way those profits will continue and then they can continue to do the research and we'll get a better deal.

So that's the theory.

Um, I don't, I don't think that's right because I think that pharmaceutical companies spend a lot more monies on say advertising and patent litigation than they actually do on, uh, on discovering drugs and so there's, you know, it's like if you, you could put a billion dollars into trying to discover a drug, but you know, what you'd probably wanna do, this is a company called AbbVie did it, they had a, a best-selling drug that brought in about 20, 30 billion dollars a year and they, what they did is they brought in, uh, McKinsey to say, "Okay, how do we extend our patent on this drug?" And McKinsey's recommendation is, "Oh, go to your scientists and offer them like i- free iPads if they can come up with additional things about the drug that they could patent." And that drug, um, I forget which one it is but it's, it's one of the blockbuster ones, but that was originally patented in 1991 and it finally came off patent like 2023, 2022 something like that.

So that's crazy, it shouldn't last nearly that long, but that's what, the incentive system in the pharmaceutical industry is not actually to discover drugs, it's actually to try to use all sorts of cheating to extend your patents so you can raise prices.

So you can attack this problem lots of different ways, um, you could definitely use international reference pricing which is something Trump wants to do and some, some Democrats in Congress want to do.

I do.