Letter to the Editor: Gates’ farmland purchases should concern us more than Twitter takeover

Delaware gas prices are on the northern side of $4 a gallon, food prices are going up by the day across the U.S., and all while the economy shrank 1.4% in the first quarter of 2022.

Yet the one thing that I hear repeatedly is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Those on the left think he is going to turn the platform into a haven for White supremacists and misogynists, while those on the right believe Musk merely wants to reinstate free speech on the site, the same site that kicked off a sitting president, while allowing an account for Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid to remain.

While the takeover is of note, I wonder why the media believes we should be so concerned with what one billionaire is doing with his money. One thing that I believe is much more important than the Musk Twitter takeover is the large land purchases by Bill Gates. It was reported by Forbes in January 2021 that the fourth-richest person in the world. holds the title of largest private farmland owner in America, with a total of 242,000 acres.

Why does this matter you ask? With the “breadbasket of the world” enthralled in the biggest European war in decades, could this billionaire be in the works of controlling our food supply? Simple math can tell us that if he were to take a quarter of that acreage (60,500 acres) out of production, he could cost the food supply 10,708,500 bushels of corn, based on the average yield of 177 bushels per acre in the U.S. in 2021. That’s a lot of food and fuel that could be produced.

So is Musk’s takeover of Twitter really the news that should be ruling our watercooler conversations?

Justin Grimminger

Dover