Free Speech Crusaders

I find it fascinating that two of our Constitution’s biggest First Amendment advocates are foreign-born, self-made American billionaires willing to take considerable risks to protect what most of us take for granted.

Rupert Murdoch, who at age 92 resigned as the Chairman of his two media companies, spent seven decades building a media empire with a significant global impact on public life. Mr. Murdoch’s crowning achievement was the purchase of the Wall Street Journal in 2007 at the then-thought exorbitant price of $5 billion. Many, myself included, had concerns that Mr. Murdoch would commercialize this venerable paper and drain it as a private equity play. Mr. Murdoch, instead, invested heavily in the Journal as he fully embraced the digital revolution and made it into an even better publication.

While I learned to speak English by watching TV for nine months, I learned to write proper English by “studying” the Journal for the past 44 years. Mr. Murdoch believed that “self-serving bureaucracies seek to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” Upon purchasing the Journal, Mr. Murdoch made clear he wanted to hear what his Editors truly thought, not what they thought he wanted to hear.

Jeff Bezos paid $250 million to purchase the Washington Post (half the price he paid for his yacht), hoping to gain a political voice. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, which he renamed X, to help defend the First Amendment.

Once a hero of the Left for his electric car innovations, Mr. Musk has since become a pariah by opening X to previously censored parties, criticizing President Biden, and signaling his intention to vote Republican.

Mr. Musk has certainly stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition, including Tesla shareholders, the Justice Department claiming he misused Tesla resources and is discriminating against asylum claimants, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Federal Trade Commission, the Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and The Anti-Defamation League, just to name a few. Unlike Jimmy Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily, who just marked his 1,000th day in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison, Mr. Musk has the U.S. Constitution to rely on.

Free speech is not free. Neither is liberty.

— Sina.