Recently, there has been a flurry of reports about the Biden administration’s efforts to enforce tough antitrust laws to improve Biden’s dismal poll ratings on the economy. According to University of Central Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl’s theory, Biden could override voters’ concerns about inflation by bashing supposedly too-big corporations that use their power to raise prices.
Ticketmaster was one of the many antitrust actions that Biden’s Administration has taken. Ticketmaster was blamed by many for the high prices that followed the original Eras Tour of Taylor Swift. As Sen. John Kennedy correctly noted, the real culprits behind high ticket prices are ticket resellers and not the original ticket sellers. They also offer more expensive tickets because artists such as Swift want to earn more money from their touring.
Kennedy, in a few minutes of questioning, solved the entire world’s concert ticketing issue.
Kennedy says that if you want to lower ticket prices, you should ban or limit ticket sales. It eliminates the whole point of using bots or old-fashioned ticket scalpers on a ticketing website to buy tickets at normal price and then resell them at outrageous prices on platforms that seem to be based on this. It’s funny to see SeatGeek CEO squirming awkwardly throughout Kennedy’s entire line of questions. Why?
SeatGeek’s business would cease to exist if secondary market ticket prices were banned.
Viagogo is the sixth-ranked ticket seller on the list. StubHub is the largest ticket seller in the US. As an aside, it’s quite a concentration of the market.
Viagogo and StubHub would love to see all the negative attention about high ticket prices focused on Ticketmaster, and not on them. Guess what? Look at the donations made by the CEO of StubHub/Viagogo. It looks like the CEO has done everything possible to encourage the Biden DOJ not to pursue Ticketmaster, even if they were the real problem.
The following is the result of a search done by the FEC in June 2024 for campaign contributions.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker donated $829,215.68 in total so far in this cycle. All of it went to Democrats. Literally all of it. All of it.
- The Biden Victory fund
- The DNC
- PA Democratic Party
- NV Democratic Party
- NC Democratic Party
- GA Democratic Party (also called the Georgia Federal Elections Committee).
- MI Democratic Party
- WI Democratic Party
So, that is all Democrats. The Biden re-elect. The DNC. And the state parties of every swing state except Arizona.
This should at least suggest that the CEO of StubHub is a partisan Democrat.
StubHub may not want Trump to forget how far they went to keep him from the White House if he retakes it. This doesn’t seem like a wise giving strategy, given the current presidential race. It could also amplify the accusations that Biden’s DOJ is hopelessly partisan in favor of Biden, his allies, and against Biden’s opponents.
