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Is Ticketmaster Telling the Truth About Its Finances?

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Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. In the 1870s, George Francis Train and Thomas C. Durant, two executives at the Union Pacific Railroad, were exposed as having stolen large sums of taxpayer money through a complex financing scheme. The U.S. government subsidized the building of the railroad, and Train and Durant paid that money to a construction company, Crédit Mobilier, that they controlled, at inflated construction rates. In doing so, they siphoned some of it to themselves, used some of it for bribes of top policymakers, and otherwise spent it on inefficient construction techniques, so as to boost the cost of building the Union Pacific and thus the amount they could bill the government. The Crédit Mobilier scandal rocked American politics, showing corruption of dozens of high level politicians, including the Speaker of the House and Vice President. Yet, the amount Train and Durant

Is Ticketmaster Telling the Truth About Its Finances? In response to recent antitrust charges, Live Nation claims it is barely profitable. But then quietly it also just flagged internal accounting issues on its investor docs. What is going on? Matt Stoller Jun 01, 2024 214 24 22 Share Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here . (I updated this piece with a few tidbits at the end). In the 1870s, George Francis Train and Thomas C. Durant, two executives at the Union Pacific Railroad, were exposed as h

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