I believe this is happening for two reasons: First, I’m embracing a theory in the world of social networking known as “preferential attachment”: The tendency for the rich to get richer applies not only to money, but also to the ability of the well connected to garner more attention. Second, I believe that vast wealth uniquely insulates the rich from the consequences of their speech. All gas, no brakes.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — which declared that political spending is a protected form of free speech — started as a legal judgment, but is slowly becoming a cultural norm as well, as an increasing number of media outlets, among them X and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, have wealthy owners, some of whom delight in taking a distinctly hands-on approach to making their own politics the politics of the platforms they own.
And the rich are also more insulated from the consequences of their speech. Self-employed billionaires like Mr. Ackman, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump can say whatever it is they want to say on social media without fear of economic or political repercussion, because their extreme wealth protects them. They can’t be fired, and even if they could, it wouldn’t matter one iota to their lifestyles.
That’s a privilege extended only to a very few Americans, despite how often our society likes to argue that we all have the same “freedom of speech.” That’s just not true anymore, if it ever was. A few ill-chosen words, publicly distributed, can get you fired from your job, without a whole lot of recourse, or “canceled,” or both, or worse. Just ask Harvard’s Dr. Gay; or Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who also recently resigned her post as president after being criticized for her remarks before Congress about campus antisemitism (as Dr. Gay and Dr. Kornbluth were as well) and for other putative faux pas; or Yao Yue, the Twitter employee whom Mr. Musk fired for publicly criticizing his “return to office” order.
Mr. Ackman, an activist investor notorious on Wall Street for agitating relentlessly and publicly for his desired outcomes, acknowledges the unique position he’s in. In a Jan. 12 CNBC interview, Mr. Ackman conceded: “If you say something that offends someone, you can lose your job. You can get blackballed. You can get canceled.” He then added: “I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of being canceled, not afraid of losing my job, and financial independence gives me the wherewithal to speak.” He considers himself a “fixer” and sees no difference between his activist campaigns to “fix” a company and an activist campaign to “fix” a university. “It’s all the same,” he said. He sees no irony in the fact that Drs. Gay and Magill and Kornbluth have no similar privilege. He has stirred up another major controversy on X by defending his wife, a former professor at M.I.T., against accusations of plagiarism laid out in a series of articles by Business Insider.