Are you worried about Elon Musk taking over Twitter? You should be.

It was announced this week that the world's richest person, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk would be buying Twitter. 

Media, academics and other platform users quickly took to their keyboards: What will this mean for Twitter, for freedom of speech, for a world in which online displays of vitriol are becoming steadily more normalized? Will things get worse for women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community: some of the most frequent targets of Twitter trolls, and also groups that have been trolled by the billionaire himself over the years? 

The good news is we have a lot of information about Musk to make an educated guess about what's to come for Twitter. The bad news is that information comes from his less than stellar record of accusations on speech, information transparency, racism and misogyny.  

I have another concern. Albeit a bit drowned out by the ongoing freedom of speech debates, I'm worried about what Musk's purchase of Twitter means for a world facing a deepening class divide, and where that is leading us to as a global community. The amount of power he will have as the sole owner of such a substantial information-sharing network should concern us all. 

A 'nightmare' for progressives: Elon Musk's buying Twitter is good for free speech

What's worse: Musk isn't the only billionaire to control major information platforms Americans use. 

Billionaires control ... everything

"This is not capitalism anymore; it is something worse. The dominant ruling class of our time no longer maintains its rule through the ownership of the means of production as capitalists do. Nor through the ownership of land as landlords do. The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information." 

This is a paragraph in the introduction of Mckenzie Wark's book, "Capital is dead. Is this something worse?" Wark wrote this before Musk bought Twitter as if she knew that yet another billionaire, now the world's richest, would buy yet another major information platform.  

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Sure, there is nothing new about billionaires steadily buying up newspapers and other information portals. That has been happening for a while. From what railroads were to early industrial tycoons, online information platforms are for today's mega rich. 

In fact, according to Forbes, the 10 richest people in the world are all men, including four who control (or will soon control) access to the majority of online information available to Americans and the world: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.

What's more: People have migrated from traditional news sources to these billionaire-owned platforms over time, making them even more powerful, in addition to economically wealthy.   

It's also true that the information we access and news we read have always been an elite business: Journalism, like law, medicine and academia, is hardly a profession of the proletariat. The difference is that, in recent decades, the rich who own these information portals have gotten infinitely richer and more powerful.

Then there's the wealth gap 

There is also the widening income inequality gap. In the United States, income inequality has been on the rise since the 1980s. Worldwide we see the same phenomenon; the pandemic only made things worse: Of the 10 richest people (men), during the past two years, their fortunes grew by $821 billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the United Nations reports that 100 million more people slipped into poverty during the same period. 

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Musk is trolling us by dangling inconceivable amounts of money in our faces while American families struggle with evictions, childhood poverty and other socioeconomic indicators that don't match up with where we should be compared with the other Group of Seven major industrialized nations. It's a sick game that only a few people in the world can afford to play. 

And the joke is on us. The wealthy are consolidating their money and power while we stand by as helpless users of their information tools. They collect our data and sell us yoga pants while we beg for health care, debt relief and a living wage.

The massive wealth gap, and consolidation of control of information platforms in the hands of a few way too powerful men, is something that should worry everyone. We can't let them think we don't notice what's going on. 

Carli Pierson is an attorney, former professor of human rights, writer and member of Paste BN's Editorial Board. You can follow her on Twitter: @CarliPiersonEsq