Elon Musk wants to buy MSNBC, but he’s not the only billionaire who might be interested

CNN
—

Elon Musk has called MSNBC “the utter scum of the earth.” He said the station was distributing “childish propaganda.” Just a few days ago he said: “MSNBC is going under.” And now he is posting memes about buying the channel.

Conventional wisdom holds that Musk – the world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s key ally – and his friends are just joking. But Musk’s posts add to MSNBC employees’ concerns about Donald Trump’s re-election and the recently announced spin-off of Comcast’s cable channels.

I spent Sunday calling sources to gauge what might be going on. I’ve learned that more than one benevolent, liberal-credit billionaire has already contacted MSNBC acquaintances to express interest in purchasing the cable channel. The incoming interest is reassuring, one of the sources said, as it shows that opposition figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.

But contrary to the claims made by Trump’s allies on If Comcast CEO Brian Roberts really wanted to sell the liberal cable news channel, he could have done so already. Instead, he is moving MSNBC and a half-dozen other cable channels into SpinCo, a cable-only programming company. The hope is that spinning off the struggling but profitable channels will boost shares of Comcast and “SpinCo.”

Comcast says the transaction will take about a year. At this point, could anyone make a bid for MSNBC? It’s complicated. “SpinCo” is structured as a tax-free spin-off and the immediate sale of an asset would have tax implications that could prevent such a sale.

“Typically, we would expect a waiting period of two years before SpinCo can take further strategic actions to preserve SpinCo’s tax exemption, although we believe there are scenarios in which industry consolidation, including SpinCo, could occur sooner.” says Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne wrote in a note to investors last week. (Morgan Stanley is a financial advisor to Comcast.)

Additionally, “SpinCo” executives may well conclude that spinning off MSNBC is not in the best interest of shareholders because the network’s loyal audience provides a form of leverage in negotiations with cable distributors. Executives involved in the spinoff say they want to be predators, not prey — by buying new channels rather than selling off the old ones piece by piece.

Selling MSNBC to win the president-elect’s favor is simply not the plan. I actually sensed a lot of enthusiasm for SpinCo at MSNBC because the new structure should allow for more investment in MSNBC, CNBC and the other brands.

However, Musk’s contributions should not be ignored. He famously announced his pursuit of Twitter with a tweet asking, “How much does it cost?” On Friday, he also asked MSNBC, “How much does it cost?” He responded to Donald Trump Jr., who posted a meme , which (incorrectly) said that MSNBC was for sale and wrote, “Hey @elonmusk I have the funniest idea ever!!!”

Joe Rogan jumped in and said, “If you buy MSNBC, I’d like Rachel Maddow’s job.” (He misspelled her name.) “I’ll wear the same outfit and the same glasses and tell the same lies.” The fans of the trio loved it, and Musk posted about the idea throughout the weekend, at one point promoting a homophobic meme that equated Maddow with Mark Cuban.

On Sunday, Trump Jr. wrote: “I think I started something here. The number of people who want this is unbelievable!!!!” Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz responded, “I 100 percent want this to happen.” The mockery is the point, and maybe it is nothing more than that.

While Musk and his friends swap memes and freak each other out, there’s a serious undercurrent here. It is known as “media capture.” This happened in Hungary when “close allies of far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also bought private television and radio stations to convert them into pro-government channels,” CNN reported earlier this month.

“Media capture” is a subset of what Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, calls “autocratic capture,” in which “the government uses its power to enforce the loyalty of the private sector.” In a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” Bassin said, “I think we’re at risk of something like this happening across the American market in all sorts of sectors.”

Gábor Scheiring, a former member of the Hungarian parliament, wrote in a new essay for Politico Magazine that Orbán “consolidated media control through centralized propaganda, market pressures and loyal billionaires.” In the United States, he wrote, “liberal-minded billionaires should not sit idly by as the right takes over the media, as they did in Hungary.”

Would Cuban, a key billionaire deputy to Vice President Kamala Harris, be interested in MSNBC? I asked him Sunday evening. “I don’t think anyone can do anything to change the impact of linear television news. So the answer is no,” Cuban replied. “People feel like MSNBC isn’t doing enough to compete with Fox. I don’t see that. What could they do differently? Inventing conspiracy theories? Go all crypto?”

Cuban added: “I would rather promote Bluesky and hope it helps them unite their audience and create a network effect that gives agency to all viewpoints.” I think with the addition of real-time news and sports, Twitter could Compete.”