Just Jack: Real-life Monopoly

I’m sure you’ve heard about the chaos on Twitter at the moment.Just mere weeks after it was purchased by the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, tech-entrepreneur and general irritant, Elon Musk for $44 billion… it is on the brink of collapse.

The whole purchasing fiasco was a bit of a shambles as well, but I’ll not bore you with that.

What I do want to talk about, however, is how has the richest man on the planet has driven one of the most powerful and influential social media platforms right into the ground, and what it represents within this world of hyper-capitalism, as a whole.

Here are the basics of the story so far – albeit, massively simplified.

Musk bought Twitter a few weeks ago, and immediately took a hammerhead approach to generating more profit for the company, including mass staff lay-offs with zero notice.

He also dreamed up the idea to charge users $8 a month for a ‘verification badge’; the recognised ‘blue tick’ icon beside their name, designed to confirm that they are the person that they say they are.

For example, Taylor Swift has verification badge beside her name, which proves that it is her official page – and that she is actually Taylor Swift.

The problem with this system is that now anyone can change their name to Taylor Swift, purchase a badge, and boom – no one knows who the real Taylor Swift is anymore.

I’m sure we can all see the detrimental implications of this.

But, if, like Elon, you do not, allow me to continue.

With his business model, now people can create fake accounts, and pretend to be massive corporations, or, indeed, any celebrity, or person that they want.

A real-life example of this was when a fake account for an American insulin company was created, and then falsely announced that insulin would be ‘free from now on’.

This caused the stock price of the company to plummet, and, upon the realisation of the investors that this issue was prevalent across the entire Twitter platform, they began to sell their shares in Twitter, too.

Okay… That might have been a bit heavy, but you get the idea.

The issue, right from the get-go, was Musk’s need to get richer. And he attempted to do this by exploiting the Twitter platform, and putting the genuine users on it at risk.

This need for the rich to get richer, mostly by making the poor poorer, is something that is much more evident in our world than you may realise – here are some more examples:

During the Russia-Ukraine war, many companies vowed to pull out of the Russian market in solidarity with Ukraine. Now, months later, most of these companies have done one of two things – either continued to operate within Russia – such as JD Sports – or simply changed their company name within Russia – such as Starbucks, which is now known as Stars Coffee in the country.

Another example – Rupert Murdoch monopolises over 62 per-cent of the UK’s news media – meaning that two-out-of-three times that you purchase a newspaper, watch a TV channel, or go on a news website – you’re adding to his $17 billion deep pockets – which ends up sounding like monopoly money.

I really could fill this entire paper with examples of hyper-capitalism. The point that I’m trying to make is that we are surrounded by it, and no matter how hard you try to avoid it – even if you buy sustainable goods, from progressive companies, managed by an innovative leader – most roads will lead back to these rich, white men – and most of the money that leaves our pockets will end up in theirs.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think a completely socialist society is the answer, either. But, I do think that life might be a bit better for the little people – aka, you and me – if there were some regulation around the flow of all this money, and if our own politicians were actually on our side.

Perhaps by not cutting the taxes for the rich and increasing them for the poor?

I know this month’s column has deviated a bit from my usual, light-hearted, teenager-centric content – but the thing is, this is just about the most teenager-centric thing I could write. It’s OUR future that’s at risk here – it’s about to become a lot harder to have the care-free life that we’ve been dreaming of since day dot.

PS – I know I appear to have targeted Elon Musk a lot this month, but there are many like him that epitomise today’s capitalist society. And, of course, he gave me the most material to work with for this column.