Prof G Markets - What the $100K H-1B Visa Fee Means for Big Tech + TikTok Deal Details Emerge
Episode Date: September 23, 2025Ed 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 edi...tor 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. Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Follow Scott on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Today's number 95.
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The show goes up.
Welcome to Profitey 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.
Invidia led the way, climbing 4% on plans to invest $100 billion in Open AI.
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 H-1B visa program,
specifically an entry fee. In order to attain an H-1B to live and work in America, you must now pay
$100,000.
To put that into perspective,
the fee to enter the H-1B 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 H-1B workers.
Now, a quick reminder, what is the H-1B visa?
Well, this is a program that goes back
to the HW Bush administration.
It was designed to attract
highly skilled workers, people with specialty knowledge, engineers, software developers, computer
scientists. 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 H-1B, people like Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
or Sunder Pichai, the CEO of Google, Jeffrey Skull, the president of eBay,
and most notably, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla.
Yes, Elon was able to stay in America thanks to an H-1B.
Without it, we wouldn't have Tesla or SpaceX or Neurrelink,
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 H-1B.
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 H-1B hasn't been eliminated, per se,
but it has definitely been put way out of reach for many, many words.
After this change, H-1B issuance is expected to plummet this year, and that makes sense, considering the average H-1B 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.
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.
We need high-skilled workers in this country.
Yes.
We need to recruit the best and brightest
world. I agree. Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest
around the world to America. 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 in 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 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.
That was in June 2024, 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-1B 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.
Okay, Peter Harrell, thank you for joining me on the program.
Ed, it's great to be on.
So Trump has issued this new entry fee.
If you want to get an H-1B, you've got to pay $100,000.
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 initial thoughts?
What are the implications of this move?
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 more blue-collar kind of immigration, people crossing the border.
It is 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 U.S. for between one and six.
years to work in specialty fields. Clearly, you're going to have implications for the tech sector,
but that's not the only sector that this is going to hit, although we think about H-1Bs as being
some of the big tech platform companies as well as startups. Elon Musk was famously in H-1B
early in his career when he was getting some of his early companies started. It is also used
by doctors, hospitals to bring, you know, 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. I just want to read you a quote from Reid Hastings, who's the, of course,
the founder of Netflix, who actually supported this move.
He said, quote, I've worked on H-1B politics for 30 years.
Trump's $100,000 per year tax is a great solution.
It will mean H-1B is used just for very high-value jobs,
which will mean no lottery needed and more certainty for those jobs.
I want to 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.
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, you know, for
U.S. government. So that's probably what's driving this. But what are the kind of positive policy
rationales potentially for this move or what are the potential upsets? Well, the first is,
although the H-1B program started back in the early 1990s was intended to bring a diverse range of
high-skill 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
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 U.S.
And so, you know, there are a number of these companies 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 $100,000 fee makes the difference between their ability to bring in talent that they want to bring in and their ability to bring that talent in or not. You know, I think the hospital, this is a major issue for them.
less of an issue for Amazon or InfoSys, which may decide they eat some of the fee here.
We'll see.
Yeah, I mean, it goes back to why do we have the H-1B in the first place.
And the whole idea is it's to make us competitive, competitive in technology and engineering,
you know, competitive in all of the highly skilled work sectors.
But, you know, 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 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? Well, so it probably is and it isn't. You know, it probably is not going to hamper
meta-platform's ability to bring in an engineer it wants to bring in, because, you know,
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 are
I think it will be harmful, will be on more of the upstart AI companies, more, more companies
that are trying to get their feet off the ground, who already find this H-1B system to be extremely
complicated to navigate, and who now are going to have to come up 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
You know, 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-skill, lower, you know, mid-skill people we otherwise would have brought in.
But I do worry the real losers here are going to be the, you know, startups, the folks who were bringing in, you know, 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
if they don't want to cede our innovative edge to our competitors.
Yes.
One really interesting start here that I did not realize,
but three quarters of H-1B workers are from India.
It used to be kind of more diverse, more balanced a while ago,
but it's now 75% we're bringing in people from India.
I'm 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? So it certainly has affected our
relationship in the sense that we saw, you know, 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 U.S. India trade negotiations.
And I have no inside information as 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 for classes of immigrants or for individual immigrants or for firms if the secretary decides that she wants to.
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 a 20,000 free H-1Bs if we get to yes on the trade deals?
Again, I have no insight 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 U.S. India relationship.
I 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?
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 $100,000. 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, you know, 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 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.
Yeah. The other thing we saw is this rollout of the Trump, the gold card visa program.
You can now pay a million dollars to live in the U.S. I'm just wondering if you're
you had any reactions to that move and perhaps what the economic implications of that program
will be? 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 H-1B reform or the H-1B fee on the same day,
you're reinforced in my mind that the money was a piece of this H-1B 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 U.S.
who are willing to pay a million dollars.
We've previously had
policies where,
you know, immigrants who are investing a lot of money
here in the U.S. So 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.
Right.
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 love to see if there's demand for that out there.
All right.
Pizza Harold.
Really appreciate your time.
Thank you for joining us on the show.
Thank you so much for having me on it.
After the break, an inside look at the latest developments at TikTok.
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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 Bight Dance.
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 bike dance 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,
business editor at Axios and author of the Daily Axios ProRata 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.
Let's start with the core issue of the outside.
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?
Yeah, so there's going to be what they're calling a lease. So basically, a copy of the TikTok algorithm will get made. BightDance will retain the original algorithm. That copy will go to what they're calling TikTok U.S., which is going to be controlled by Silver Lake and Oracle.
and Andreessen Horowitz and other U.S. 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 want 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 Bight Dance is going to continue to operate TikTok in countries outside of the U.S.
So it still needs access to the algorithm as well.
So what is Oracle's role here?
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 is going to be an.
equity investor in TikTok U.S., one of the three managing partners, I guess you could say,
of this new company?
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 Biden's 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.
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, you know, 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.
China during the meeting in Madrid
approved of this during call with Trump and Xi.
they signed off and that there's going to be actual paperwork signed shortly.
I wanted to ask about that. Is this really a framework or is there a deal?
Your sense, is there actual paperwork and a signature is incoming?
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 U.S., i.e. who all the investors are and what stake they'll all own,
that's not entirely determined yet. And even potentially, the U.S. 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 official will be signed until the final closing paperwork.
Do you have any sense of what these deal terms might look like, what the pricing could be?
Honestly, I don't. You know, we've, the talk has been all over the place. What complicates this is a
couple things. For starters, bite dance is valued it 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 under 20% of TikTok U.S.
if this goes through.
You use the phrase save face that Biden's 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?
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 the
companies have to do. Bight Dance 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. Over the weekend, Trump said
that the Murdox and Michael Dell are involved. Do you have any intel on that?
It's true and it's kind of shorthand. In terms of Michael Dell, his family office a couple 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 Murdoch's, Lockland 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.
Would you say that's 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?
Unclear right now. Oracle again is interesting because they've been involved with TikTok and bite dance for so long. And back in 2019 when there was first talk of divestiture, Oracle considered being an equity partner, then it 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 Flarell. So we'll put some of his own in, although he could also contribute some Oracle shares, which is kind of the same thing.
When I think about where it seems like this app is headed into the hands of investors,
including the Murdox and the Ellisons, 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?
Well, Americans have been told for the past five years.
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. 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's 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.
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,
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 Andresan 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.
for the most part. I think it's worth noting there's still some people who are kind of
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 access pro rata
newsletter. And at the very end of it, it basically said the deal's not done until it's done.
And somebody who is 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. 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. 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?
I think we could be. I mean, look, 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 only kind of caveat, I would say to all this,
or not even a caveat, but the thing to watch is this has been used. TikTok has been used as a
trade bargaining chip by both the U.S. 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, they could cancel the contractor. Maybe it's not
perpetuity. So there's still some kind of outstanding things there that could become,
you know, monkeys in the ranch. All right. Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. That was Dan Primak, 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,
as 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.
It will also be, perhaps, Rupert Murdoch, the mastermind behind Fox News. Those are the people
who will own the most descendant 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, 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, Megan Kelly, Joe Rogan,
or tech, where the most influential social media platforms are controlled by people who are friends with the president or who have donated to the president X,
Instagram, Facebook, and now potentially TikTok to be owned by the Ellisons and, yes, the Murdox.
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 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.
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 Shalon, Isabella Kinsell, Kristen O'Donohue, and Mia Silverio,
and our technical director is Drew Burroughs.
Thank you for listening to Proffty Markets from Proffty Media.
If you liked what you heard, give us a follow.
I'm Ed Elson.
I'll see you tomorrow.