During CNN’s election coverage on Wednesday, CNN Senior Political Commentator and former Obama Adviser Van Jones stated that there is a structural issue where Elon Musk can have influence through campaign donations and also owning Twitter/X, and, “in a normal country, we would say, hold on a second, maybe we need to have a different set of regulations for social media platforms now that they’re this big, maybe we need to have less money in the system. But that conversation is not happening yet.”
Jones said, “Look, we can all praise Elon Musk, and we should. When he’s in his lane doing what he does, he is one of the greatest people ever, Neuralink, Tesla. But it’s a structural problem that someone with his resources — he’s on his way to becoming a trillionaire — can just dump unlimited amounts of money in our system and have undue influence and then also buy half of social media on planet earth.”
Later, after the subject of other tech platforms like Google came up, he added, “[T]here are two sets of laws and rulings we have to deal with, the Supreme Court has allowed this unlimited amount of money dumping in, and then there are legal protections that allow these companies to do what they want to and do what they will. I think, in a normal country, we would say, hold on a second, maybe we need to have a different set of regulations for social media platforms now that they’re this big, maybe we need to have less money in the system. But that conversation is not happening yet.”
