
Owned
How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
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Narrated by:
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Ramiz Monsef
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By:
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Eoin Higgins
About this listen
A cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media landscape.
Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and new journalism. In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence. Their cronies are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—once known as idealistic and left-leaning voices, now beneficiaries of Silicon Valley largesse. Together, this new alliance aims to exploit the failings of traditional journalism and undermine the very idea of an independent and fact-based fourth estate.
Owned examines how this shift has allowed spectacularly wealthy reactionaries to pursue their ultimate goal of censoring critics so to further their own business interests—and personal vendettas—entirely unimpeded while also advancing a toxic and antidemocratic ideology.
A rich history of the decades-long rise of this new right-wing alternative media takeover, Owned follows the money, names names, and offers a chilling portrait of a future social media and news landscape. It is a biting exposé of journalistic greed, tech-billionaire ambition, and a lament for a disappearing free press.
©2025 Eoin Higgins (P)2025 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
"Copaganda" is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.
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Learn your country
- By Hollingsworth on 06-25-25
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Black Pill
- How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
- By: Elle Reeve
- Narrated by: Elle Reeve
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right.
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Great story — uneven performance
- By SSG on 08-19-24
By: Elle Reeve
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Stuck
- How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
- By: Yoni Appelbaum
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.
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land of opportunity
- By Anonymous User on 03-16-25
By: Yoni Appelbaum
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Wild Faith
- How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America
- By: Talia Lavin
- Narrated by: Talia Lavin
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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From school boards to the Supreme Court, Christian theocracy is ascendant in America—and only through exploring its motivations and impacts can we understand the crisis we face. In Wild Faith, Lavin fearlessly confronts whether our democracy can survive an organized, fervent theocratic movement, one that seeks to impose its religious beliefs on American citizens.
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Rough listen
- By Nick on 12-10-24
By: Talia Lavin
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Original Sins
- The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
- By: Eve L. Ewing
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Eve L. Ewing
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
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A must read for educators and everyone!
- By Alonna on 05-06-25
By: Eve L. Ewing
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The Return of Great Powers
- Russia, China, and the Next World War
- By: Jim Sciutto
- Narrated by: Jim Sciutto
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN’s air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a “1939 moment.” History never ended—it barely paused—and the global order as we have known it is now gone. Great powers are reinvigorated and determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as it escalates, this new order will affect everyone across the globe.
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Disappointing
- By Douglas Peifer on 03-14-24
By: Jim Sciutto
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The Contrarian
- Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
- By: Max Chafkin
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.
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Don’t burn a credit.
- By John on 09-27-21
By: Max Chafkin
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More Everything Forever
- AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
- By: Adam Becker
- Narrated by: Greg Tremblay
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. In More Everything Forever, science writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass.
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Puts words to thoughts that have been haunting me
- By Ellen L. on 04-24-25
By: Adam Becker
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Cults Like Us
- Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America
- By: Jane Borden
- Narrated by: Jane Borden
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.
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Essential listening for anyone interested in understanding America’s past and present
- By Aldous Huxley on 06-09-25
By: Jane Borden
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Money, Lies, and God
- Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
- By: Katherine Stewart
- Narrated by: Patricia Rodriguez
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down.
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Describes a well funded international fascist cult
- By marwalk on 03-24-25
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Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
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Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
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Murder the Truth
- Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful
- By: David Enrich
- Narrated by: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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David Enrich, the New York Times Business Investigations Editor and the #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers, produces his most consequential and far-reaching investigation yet: an in-depth exposé of the broad campaign—orchestrated by elite Americans—to silence dissent and protect the powerful.
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The current threat against journalists
- By Kirk Writes on 04-04-25
By: David Enrich
well researched and communicated
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Interesante
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More of a screed than an analysis
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