Why politicians want to buy the news

In December 2020, in the relative lull between Donald Trump’s defeat and Jan. 6, 2021, a right-leaning biotech entrepreneur named Vivek Ramaswamy joined a call with two billionaire titans of the right’s battles over speech and technology: Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

The subject was a plan to roll up a new tech giant that would be wide open to the speech, from extreme partisanship to vaccine skepticism, that had been pushed off platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The company would build a new cloud services alternative to Amazon Web Services, and swallow smaller startups like Parler, a Twitter alternative associated with American conservatives. Ramaswamy, his would-be partners suggested, could be CEO.

Ramaswamy discussed the previously unreported call with my co-host Nayeema Raza and me on our show, “Mixed Signals,” last week. “I briefly was intrigued by media,” he said — but, understandably, “I decided to go the direction of financial services as my next stop.”