A profile of FTC Chair Lina Khan, whose term ended in September 2024, as a bipartisan club of tech figures and VCs, including Reid Hoffman, call for her ouster
Biden's FTC chair has toughened merger oversight, taken on noncompetes and made the donor class crazy.
Bloomberg
Context & Ripple Effects
Khan's tenure was defined by a more confrontational FTC posture toward market power: related coverage traced her rise from an argument for reshaping Amazon antitrust scrutiny to a chance to test that approach in court through her court-facing antitrust agenda.
The opposition arrives after Khan also framed AI partnerships and acquisitions as possible areas for enforcement attention in the FTC's scrutiny of AI-era dealmaking. The dispute is therefore over the agency's operating philosophy, not merely one personnel decision.
First-order effects
A bipartisan group of technology figures and investors publicly associates Khan's merger and noncompete agenda with costs to the innovation and investment ecosystem they represent.
With Khan's chair term already ended, the campaign chiefly intensifies the political contest over how her FTC record should shape the agency's next leadership and enforcement priorities.
Second-order effects
Companies facing merger review or labor-rule exposure gain a clearer incentive to press for a less aggressive FTC posture, while advocates of Khan's approach must defend it against claims of overreach.
AI startups, investors and large platforms face added uncertainty over whether scrutiny of acquisitions and commercial partnerships will remain a priority after the leadership change.
Third-order effects
If personnel campaigns become a recurring response to aggressive enforcement, FTC policy may become more visibly tied to technology-industry coalition building rather than only case-by-case legal tests.
The deeper fault line is whether antitrust institutions should adapt to platform and AI-market structures even when the legal and political durability of that approach remains contested.
The trend: This is one data point in the widening struggle between technology capital and regulators over how far competition enforcement should reach into digital and AI-era markets.
🟡News: Harris surrogate @mcuban doesn't believe Harris should keep Lina Khan as FTC chair. “If it were me, I wouldn't,” Cuban said to @semafor at a @KFF lunch. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence”
This is a great piece on FTC Chair Lina Khan, who's arguably been the single most effective Biden appointee to date - while also being the youngest. (I'm biased, but I'll get to that part.) And appreciated by both Elizabeth Warran & Josh Hawley. Odd? Yep. https://www.bloomberg.co…
Reid Hoffman, the guy calling for the head of the FTC chair, is actually under *five separate FTC investigations*, per this great @josheidelson/@chafkin profile. Gotta love this alibi: https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
“There's no AI exemption from the law,” says @linakhanFTC. “If you're deceiving people through algorithms, you don't get some type of free pass because you're saying, ‘Oh, the machine did it.’ ” https://www.bloomberg.com/... @BW
Biden's choice of Lina Khan as FTC chair, privately pushed by allies including Elizabeth Warren, was surprising enough that when Amy Klobuchar blurted the news out, some Amazon officials assumed it was a joke, per people familiar https://www.bloomberg.com/...
The politics of this is fascinating. Basically there is zero political upside. It's good policy, but doesn't really translate into much with the general public even if they'd support it if they knew about it. But it ENRAGES very powerful people.
While FTC's noncompete ban is blocked by a judge, Pete Buttigieg's Transportation Dept. has been exploring a similar measure. FTC has also gotten some firms to drop noncompetes as a condition to merge, & has sued companies whose noncompetes it deems unfair https://www.bloomberg.c…
Let me make this clear, since billionaires have been trying to play footsie with the ticket: Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise. She proves this admin fights for working people. It would be terrible leadership to remove her.
Biden's FTC chair has toughened merger oversight, taken on noncompetes and made the donor class crazy. She hints that there's a lot more to come, if she's given the chance. A must-read on a figure now central in the election by @josheidelson and @chafkin https://www.bloomberg.com…
In which campaign donors complain on the record that Khan is doing her job without playing politics.... Thanks I guess ? h/t @josheidelson for stellar reporting https://www.bloomberg.com/...
“It's no surprise to me personally that monopolists, & executives associated with monopolies, would prefer that the anti-monopoly cops just go away,” Lina Khan told us when asked about flack from billionaires. “But that's not the job that we've been given” https://www.bloomberg.c…
New in @bw from me and this guy. Big piece looking at Lina Khan, trying to understand why so many investors hate her and why a bunch of Dems welcome the hate
Great profile of @linakhanFTC by @josheidelson and Max Chafkin going into detail about the impact of her work and the broad support. But the money quote below shows that Lina Khan only serves the people, not party donors and power brokers at any cost. https://www.bloomberg.com/..…
Mark Cuban told us Lina Khan “has done a great job with misleading ads online and fighting PBMs” but “far outstepped her bounds on the M&A front,” and that her approach to tech has harmed America's “ability to compete with China and Russia in AI.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... @m…
Reid Hoffman, who made news urging Kamala Harris replace FTC Chair Lina Khan, is a party to five different FTC inquiries: https://www.bloomberg.com/... The FTC has asked Inflection AI to turn over emails and texts from Hoffman and other senior leaders, per a person familiar.
The first part of this new profile of Lina Khan, and her vision for a second term as FTC Chair, is just a laundry list of ways that she has actually used the agency in highly effective and purposeful ways that make billionaires lose their minds. It's good! https://www.bloomberg.c…
NEW @BW feature: “Who's Afraid of Lina Khan?” Based on conversations with 100 people - billionaires, service workers, agency heads, executives, VCs, senators, scholars, advocates, current/former FTC staff, & Khan herself, at HQ & on the road. Unpaywalled: https://www.bloomberg.co…