Elon Musk floats buying MSNBC, but he’s not the only billionaire who may be interested

By CNN

Published November 25, 2024 2:16 PM

CNN

Analysis by Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Elon Musk has called MSNBC “the utter scum of the Earth.” He has said the channel “peddles puerile propaganda.” Just a few days ago he said, “MSNBC is going down.” And now he is posting memes about buying the channel.

Conventional wisdom holds that Musk — the world’s richest man and key Donald Trump ally — and his friends are just joking. But Musk’s posts are adding to the anxiety that MSNBC staffers are feeling about the reelection of Donald Trump and the recently announced spinoff of Comcast’s cable channels.

I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.

But contrary to claims that Trump’s allies are posting on X, Comcast has not put a “for sale” sign on MSNBC’s door. If Comcast chief Brian Roberts really wanted to sell the liberal cable news channel, he could have done that already. Instead, he is moving MSNBC and a half dozen other cable channels into “SpinCo,” a pure-play cable programming company. The hope is that spinning off the pressured-but-profitable channels will boost shares of both Comcast and “SpinCo.”

Comcast says the transaction will take about a year. At that point, could someone swoop in with a bid for MSNBC? It’s complicated. “SpinCo” is structured as a tax-free spinoff, and immediately divesting an asset would have tax implications that could forestall any such sale.

“Typically, we would expect a two-year waiting period before any potential further strategic action by the SpinCo to preserve the tax-free nature of the spin although we believe there are scenarios where industry consolidation including SpinCo could happen earlier,” analyst Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to investors last week. (Morgan Stanley is a financial advisor to Comcast.)

Plus, “SpinCo” executives may well conclude that offloading MSNBC is not in the best interest of shareholders, since the channel’s loyal audience is a form of leverage in negotiations with cable distributors. Executives involved with the spinoff say they intend to be predators, not prey – buying new channels, not selling off old ones bit by bit.

Selling MSNBC to win favor with the president-elect is simply not the plan. I have sensed quite a bit of enthusiasm at MSNBC about “SpinCo,” actually, because the new structure should allow for more investment into MSNBC, CNBC and the other brands.

Musk’s allies pile on

That said, Musk’s posts shouldn’t be ignored. He famously foreshadowed his pursuit of Twitter with a tweet that asked, “How much is it?” On Friday, he similarly asked of MSNBC, “How much does it cost?” He was responding to Donald Trump, Jr., who posted a meme that (falsely) said MSNBC is for sale and wrote, “Hey @elonmusk I have the funniest idea ever!!!”

Joe Rogan jumped in and said, “If you buy MSNBC I would like Rachel Maddow’s job.” (He misspelled her name.) “I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.” The trio’s fans ate it up, and Musk kept posting about the idea all weekend long, at one point promoting a homophobic meme that equated Maddow with Mark Cuban.

By Sunday, Trump Jr. wrote, “I think I started something here. The amount of people that want this to happen is incredible!!!!” Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz replied, “I 100 percent want this to happen.” The mockery is the point, and maybe it’s nothing more than that.

The ‘media capture’ model

While Musk and his friends trade memes and crack each other up, there’s a serious undercurrent here. It’s known as “media capture.” This happened in Hungary when far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán’s “close allies also purchased private television and radio outlets to convert them into pro-government outlets,” CNN reported earlier this month.

“Media capture” is a subset of what Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin calls “autocratic capture,” where “the government uses its power to enforce loyalty from the private sector.” On a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” Bassin said “I think we are in danger of seeing that happen across the American marketplace 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 pressure and loyal billionaires.” In the US, he wrote, “liberal-minded billionaires should not sit idly by as they did in Hungary, watching the right take over the media.”

Would Cuban, a key billionaire surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris, have any interest in MSNBC? I asked him Sunday night. “I don’t think there is anything anyone can do to change the impact of linear TV news. So the answer is no,” Cuban replied. “People feel like MSNBC is not doing enough to rival Fox. I don’t see that. What could they do differently? Manufacture conspiracy theories? Go all in on crypto?”

Cuban added: “I would rather promote Bluesky and hope it helps them aggregate audience, and create a network affect that gives agency to all viewpoints. I think with the addition of real time news and sports, it could give Twitter a run for its money.”

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