Wealth & Money Quote by Michael King

It’s a neat inversion of the standard media myth: money and content aren’t the moat, people are. King’s line punctures the old industrial confidence that scale automatically produces loyalty. “Big media companies” reads less like a neutral description than a skeptical category: institutions built for one-way broadcasting, optimized for pipelines, not communities. The sentence structure does the work. It grants the giants their obvious advantages (“lots of money and content”) and then drops the blade: “but” exposes the missing organ, the capacity to cultivate a “base of users” rather than a passive audience.

The subtext is historical, in the way a historian would frame it: empires fall when their logistics outpace their legitimacy. “Tap into” is revealingly transactional language, implying that corporations see users as a resource to be extracted, not a constituency to be served. That mindset helps explain the failure he’s pointing to. You can’t mine trust. You have to earn it, and earning it requires feedback loops, identity, and a sense that participation changes outcomes.

Contextually, King is speaking from the late-20th-century pivot when media began sliding from mass broadcast to networked culture. In that emerging landscape, distribution gets cheaper, attention gets scarcer, and allegiance migrates to spaces that feel responsive. The line anticipates why nimble upstarts, forums, and later social platforms could outmaneuver incumbents: not by outspending them, but by organizing belonging.