Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left

Journalist and historian Higgins looks at political ideological shifts in journalism and the influence of big tech on media. He focuses his analysis on case studies of the careers of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Both took positions on the political left early in their careers, but they later moved to the right. Higgins asserts that their ideological shifts to the influence of money and catering of their opinions to the right-leaning media resulted in their gaining more online attention. Simultaneously, tech entrepreneurs such as Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel invested in media platforms to assert their influence. Higgins uses controversies such as the Edward Snowden intelligence case, the Twitter Files leaks, and Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X to illustrate his points and highlight the dominance of government contracts in big tech. Higgins calls himself a “civil libertarian leftist,” and his commentary and analysis are conducted through this lens. He does, however, include opinions from other journalists to temper his obvious dislike of Greenwald.