In all the chaos of the global banking crisis, there is an important news story I do not want you to miss. Elon Musk is under attack.
Earlier this month, a report was released from Congress investigating claims that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was being weaponized to harass Elon Musk and Twitter. What they found was shocking.
Before we get in to this. If you watch this channel you know that I am not a fan of Elon Musk. The business model of Tesla is heavily based in China, which means he is compromised. However, he is under attack as a business owner by the US government and that is not right either. I do not see this as a political issue either. Because whether you are Republican or Democrat, no one should want this. We do not want government agencies to be used to go after political opponents.
So, what did the report find? The FTC has been bombarding Elon Musk with inquiries about Twitter. There have been dozens of letters with more than 350 demands. That is roughly 35 requests per week. Each of these requests must be reviewed and responded to by a lawyer within 15 days. As you can imagine, this is horribly expensive. The government is trying to shut Twitter down through excessive paperwork.
The accusation in the report is that these are politically motivated attacks. The FTC is run by Lina Khan. Lina previously worked as the legal director for a liberal think tank called the Open Markets Institute. This is an organization encouraging the government to break up monopolies. Lina has written several academic papers on the topic including “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the Yale Law Journal.
I am actually a fan of a lot of what Lina Khan has to say. I also think Amazon is an oppressive monopoly that needs to be broken up. Apple should be broken up. Facebook should be broken up. When monopoly’s get broken up, you the consumer become better off. But I am not convinced that this is what she is trying to achieve here. While Twitter is dominant in social media, it is a stretch to call it a monopoly. So, what is going on?
Everyone knows the story. Elon Musk has become an enemy of the left political movement in America. He purchased Twitter, and has been publishing the “Twitter Files” that show mostly Democrat efforts to use social media to censor Americans, a violation of Freedom of Speech.
The allegations in the report suggest the democrats are using the FTC to try and shut Elon Musk down. How can they legally send all these requests? In 2011, long before Elon Musk bought Twitter, Twitter was doing some very shady things. They were having their customers sign up for two-factor authentication, and then taking the customer information they gathered and secretly selling it for targeted advertising. Twitter was caught and, in 2011, they signed a consent agreement with the FTC. This consent agreement allowed the FTC to send Twitter periodic questions in order to monitor that they were no longer misusing customer information.
So, when Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter on Oct 27, 2022 he inherited this consent agreement from 2011, a decade prior. I read the letters, because they are included in the report, and in my opinion, they are absurd. The FTC requests are shocking and have nothing to do with customer information. The FTC asks for all Twitter internal communications relating to Elon Musk. They asked for the identities of all journalists working on the Twitter Files. And even the documentation surrounding Elon Musk firing Jim Baker, the former FBI General Counsel who helped censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. So, here is a company who is releasing information criticizing the government, that is then being attacked by the FTC. This is not right.
The Federal Trade Commission is supposed to protect consumers from anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices. A good example is the original Twitter action of secretly selling their customers information. Twitter’s actions were bad, and that is what the FTC should be working on. But trying to find out the identity of journalists is not the FTC’s job. The FTC should be taking on Amazon for their abusive practices, not Twitter.
The reason you should care about this, is that Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. If they can do this to Elon Musk, just imagine what they can do to you. If you speak out against the government, they can bury your business in paperwork and try to shut you down. This is wrong and it needs to stop. This is abuse of power and corruption and it has no place at the FTC.
SOURCES:
Congressional report: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Weaponization_Select_Subcommittee_Report_on_FTC_Harrassment_of_Twitter_3.7.2023.pdf
Yale Law Journal: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
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Neither Zach De Gregorio or Wolves and Finance shall be liable for any damages related to information in this video. It is recommended you contact a CPA in your area for business advice.