In what is surely unintentional humor the staff at Wired offered a yearend list of “the most dangerous people, groups, and organizations on the internet” in 2024. Bet you can guess who came first:

More than any particular political message or technology he’s pushed, however, the danger Musk represents is simply that the richest man in the world can buy one of the internet’s most vital media platforms, then use it, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, to elect the president of his choosing and shape US policy. After Trump’s election, Musk was rewarded with hundreds of billions more in net worth. The system, in other words, is working—for oligarchs like Elon Musk.

“Elon Musk,” December 30, 2024

If the Wired staff really believes that Elon Musk single-handedly swung the US election — that the outcome had little to do with the candidates’ issues — it is a good thing that they mostly stick to tech issues. They’re way better at that.

For example, here’s their entry in the same article on the Black Cat/AlphV/RansomHub shakedown:

Ransomware in 2024 was, again, one of the most abhorrent forms of cybercrime to blight the internet. But few ransomware attacks in history have been quite as dangerous and damaging as the one that targeted UnitedHealthcare subsidiary Change Healthcare early this year, carried out by a ransomware group known as Black Cat or AlphV. Even after extracting a $22 million ransom from the company—a payment processor that handles around 40 percent of all health care insurance claims across the US—the hackers’ disruption of Change’s network continued to prevent the company from completing payments to pharmacies, clinics, health care practices, and hospitals across the country for weeks, causing some to even go out of business. Then, as if it hadn’t inflicted enough chaos, AlphV ran off with Change’s ransom money instead of sharing it with a group of hackers with whom it had partnered to infiltrate the company. That led the jilted hackers to share the data stolen from Change Healthcare with another, newer ransomware crew called RansomHub, which extorted the company a second time—an unprecedented health care cybersecurity debacle.

The corporate world needs to pay more attention to ransomware issues and Wired can help them stay on top of them, if they stick to what they do best.

About Musk: He succeeds in communication because he grasps something that the Wired staff may not: The internet has crashed the cost of providing media. Thus thousands of indies are sharing the spotlight with venerable outfits like Wired. And that probably won’t change. So, as Musk advises, “Don’t hate the media, become the media.” Otherwise, be Wired, sticking to what it does best.