Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left

A cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media landscape.

Matt Taibbi used to take on the rich and powerful, but today, his reporting is crafted to please grievance-addicted American conservatives. Glenn Greenwald, whose reporting on the Snowden leaks arguably changed the course of history, has similarly taken a hard right turn. Yet these political transformations of journalists formerly associated with the left did not happen in a vacuum. The new mouthpieces of the right are paid and disseminated by an emerging “alternative” media ecosystem, funded by a cohort of billionaires whose goal is to censor critics, so these new plutocrats can pursue their businesses—and personal vendettas—entirely unimpeded.

Owned is the story of the underreported collaboration between the new wealth and the new journalism. Right-wing billionaires like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk use their wealth to fund journalists—like Taibbi and Greenwald—who exploit the failings of traditional journalism and social media. This unholy alliance has undermined the very idea of an independent and fact-based press while ostensibly standing up for principles of liberty and free speech.

A biting exposé of journalist greed and tech-billionaire ambition, Owned follows the money, and offers a chilling portrait of the future social media and news landscape, empty of all critique, except for newly empowered right-wing commentators.