This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is of course Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. He's the

Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University

of Chicago. Now Richard Big Tech is back in the news we've got to talk about

Amazon and some unionization

votes but we've also got to talk about Elon Musk because he may be buying Twitter.

This saga started last month when he it was announced that he'd bought 9% of the company and had been

invited to join the board but then he turned that board seat down, spent a weekend

tweeting ideas about how to change the company, and then it's just submitted an all- cash offer to purchase Twitter on a hostile takeover.

Now of course Musk runs Tesla, he runs SpaceX and he could end up running Twitter,

three companies that are dominant in their fields.

At what point does he run into some sort of, I don't know, monopolist wall that regulators of the FTC might

say you weren't allowed to do this. I mean, is he can he keep

can he keep expanding into other industries?

But the answer is yes if he keeps expanding into other industries. The general view that the FTC takes even under

misconduct is that it's concentration in a given industry that gives rise to

monopoly power that allows you to essentially maintain price rises even as you

increase the or reduce the total number of goods that you receive and these are

unrelated industries so it's not going to be an antitrust college in the in the particular web.

There is however the possibility of a neo-brandician situation.

The neo-brandicians is it become a very fashionable term. This is based on the work that Louis Brandeis did when he was actually on the Supreme Court writing about various stuff in which he says the great risks that we have in politics is not market

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