This article by Mike Morrissey first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
TWO hundred and fifty years ago, Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) warned that ‘people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices’. In a recent Guardian column, Polly Toynbee (The Guardian, 06/02/2026) wrote ‘a tiny cabal of billionaires controls most of what the world needs, with no concern for what’s below their flying palaces (private planes with an average value of around $100 million) circling the globe’. Both are right.
The contemporary concentration of wealth, and therefore abuse of power, has been a consistent theme in these Unity articles – the Global Inequality Report 2026 found that just 60,000 individuals controlled three times more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. ‘Since 2008 the wealth of the world’s billionaires (as a share of GDP) has roughly doubled’ (Will Dunn, New Statesman, 06/02/2026).
The Technology ‘Brotherhood’
Some argue that the change has been so profound as to transform the mode of production itself. Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism, 2023), for example, argues that a small set of techno-plutocrats now owns the cloud (just as feudal lords owned the land) and, like peasants, we pay tribute in the form of personal data (usually offered free), the crucial commodity of the digital economy. Surplus value is thus generated not just from labour but from living.
One may not agree with Varoufakis’ categories, but it’s undeniable that we inhabit an extreme form of techno-oligopoly capitalism. Nine of the world’s ten biggest companies by market value (all headed by men) are in the technology sector (www.investopedia.com). At the end of last year, these nine were valued at just under $25 trillion (bigger than US real GDP accounting for inflation). The largest, Nvidia (suppling the chips for the tsunami of AI investment), has a capital value of just under $5 trillion. More, they have become increasingly interlinked. For example, Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI has been valued at $135 billion. Nvidia has invested $100 billion in OpenAI, primarily to allow the latter to buy Nvidia chips for data centres.
Musk’s latest venture is to amalgamate SpaceX and XAI (valued at $1.25 trillion and making it the world’s biggest private company) to build data centres in space which he described, with his usual modesty, as extending ‘the light of consciousness to the stars’ (The Guardian 07/02/2026).
In most cases, the capital value of these companies is many multiples of their earnings. For instance, last year’s turnover for Nvidia was $130.5 billion and net profit $72.9 billion. Its capital value was thus 38 times turnover and 64 times profit. Their values have been much inflated by the belief that a fundamental break-through in Artificial General Intelligence will lead to a geometric increase in productivity. There is, however, a growing worry that such inflated values will not hold up, with even the governor of the Bank of England urging caution.
It’s not hard to find examples of behaviour resembling that of feudal lords. Take, for example, Trump’s cabinet with a combined wealth of $9 billion (compared to Biden’s $120 million) whose members seem to think the world is theirs for the taking – Gaza – Venezuela – Iran – Greenland etc.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the US position on the Corruptions Perceptions Index (www.transparency.org) fell from 16 to 29 between 2019 and 2025. Some of the tech lords, like Musk, demand literally unbelievable rewards – a recently negotiated pay settlement at Tesla is said to be worth a trillion dollars. Others feel they can dictate to governments – during the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie Dimon, boss of the US’s biggest bank JP Morgan, felt able to ring a British Chancellor (Alistair Darling) to threaten to offload UK debt if a surtax were to be imposed on banker bonuses. We recently learned that he was so advised by Peter Mandelson.
The Free Speech Absolutists
What’s remarkable is the way these people so frequently cloak themselves in a ‘free speech’ banner. At last year’s Munich Security Conference , the US vice president ‘alleged European Union “commissars” were suppressing free speech, blamed the continent for mass migration, and accused its leaders of retreating from some of its most fundamental values’ (www.bbc.co.uk/news, 14/02/2025).
This year, even the right-wing German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, declared ‘freedom of speech ends here with us when that speech goes against human dignity’ (The Guardian, 16/02/2026). The US National Security Strategy, published last November, called for strengthening the ‘patriotic’ European parties, i.e. AFD, RN, Fidesz, Vox, and Reform, which apparently, though never off the media, are denied their voice by a liberal deep state.
When buying Twitter, Musk declared himself a ‘free-speech absolutist’ who would free Twitter (renamed X like everything else he owns except Tesla) from the bonds of censorship. We have seen how that turned out with an app that allowed digital images of children to be undressed. For most of January (26 days), he posted about threats to the white race, race science or anti-immigrant conspiracy content (The Guardian 12/02/2026).
The Spanish government is preparing a set of measures to regulate the ‘digital wild west’, including a ban on under 16s using social media. Musk posted a response on X – ‘Dirty Sanchez (the prime minister) is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain…the true fascist totalitarian’ (The Guardian, 04/02/2026).
Even ignoring Musk’s possibly ketamine-driven postings, Rafael Behr argues ‘social media platforms resemble engines of radicalisation, accelerating any opinion towards its most extreme iteration, shrinking the pool of agreed facts, atrophying society’s capacity to empathise with alternative perspectives’. Regulation is not an option; it is vital to protecting even the most basic social values.
This is not about debating the tensions between public interest and private enterprise. Rather, it’s about a set of techno and other billionaires all out to crush any dissent about how they make profits while quietly colluding with Trump’s assault on the US constitution and encouraging the rise of the authoritarian right in Europe – MAGA politics and Silicon Valley are deeply intertwined. This year the EU is finally employing its Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts to impose some regulation on the digital economy. Trump claimed this to be anti-American and threatened ‘immediate and substantial retaliation’ (European Business Magazine, 05/01/2026).
Not So Free
Extraordinarily, these free-speech evangelists are remarkably sensitive to what is said about them The US president is particularly thin skinned despite the array of insults, lies and other defamations he throws around repeatedly. He has sued the BBC for $5-$10 billion, not for misrepresenting his words, but for putting them in the wrong order.
Some have become subordinate. During Trump’s first term the Washington Post was a consistent critic, compiling, for example, a list of all his false or misleading statements (over 30,000). However, 11 days before the 2024 election, its owner, Jeff Bezos, pulled the intended endorsement of Kamala Harris (Patrick Soon Shiong did the same in the Los Angeles Times). He then insisted that opinion pieces be underpinned by ‘personal liberties and free markets pillars’.
At the beginning of February, he axed 300 newsroom jobs having just backed the Melania documentary with $75 million. Some think this positional about-face was related to Amazon’s failure to secure a Pentagon cloud-computing network worth $10 billion in 2019, which, it claimed, was retaliation by Trump for Washington Post articles.
Others are part of the project. David Ellison, son of Trump’s close friend and adviser Larry Ellison (Oracle), is CEO of Paramount Skydance which owns the CBS news network. He appointed Bari Weiss, a prominent anti-woke campaigner with no TV experience, as editor-in-chief. Paramount Skydance has just launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner that includes CNN. Two of the US’s biggest news brands will thus be in the hands of MAGA. In short, these people are following the well-trodden path created by Berlusconi, Orban and Netanyahu to control and subordinate the news media.
Lies, Dammed Lies and Free Speech
Closer to home, Jim Radcliffe, billionaire boss of the chemical giant Ineos (it received £120 million in state aid last year) and a tax exile, claimed the UK population had risen from 58 million in 2020 to 70 million in 2025 as a result of immigration – in effect, it was being ‘colonised’ (The Independent, 12/02/2026). Farage claimed the colonisation term was correct according to its dictionary definition – it isn’t. In fact, the ONS population figure for 2020 was 67 million, the increase being about a quarter of that claimed. Neither admitted the misrepresentation. Another claim is that services to the ‘native’ UK population are being crowed out by the vast amounts spent on asylum seekers. The cost of the latter is around £5 billion compared to total spending of almost £1400 billion, i.e. 0.3% of the total.
Free speech is important and people are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts. Such non-facts and distortions are widely reported in the conventional, never mind social, media and have real world effects.
It’s hard to know whether these ‘free speakers’ know they are disseminating nonsense but do so for cynical reasons or are genuinely ignorant. For asylum seekers huddling in hotels under attack or ethnic minorities confronting mounting abuse, it hardly matters.