Gail Slater on why trial of the live-entertainment giant went from "'merely historic' to 'unprecedented' in the antitrust hall of fame"

This week, a coalition of more than 30 state attorneys general won a landmark monopolization case against Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster. The win alone was truly historic. As if this was not enough, the states prevailed in a jury trial in Manhattan, and the team that went to trial did so on a week’s notice after the DOJ abruptly dropped out as lead counsel in March. These factors combined shift the Live Nation case from “merely historic” to “unprecedented” in the antitrust hall of fame.  

I should know. Until February of this year, I was the assistant attorney general in charge of the Antitrust Division at the DOJ. As such, I oversaw the Live Nation case through its busiest phase. In a March 2025 executive order, the White House instructed the DOJ to apply the antitrust laws in the live-entertainment industry. At its peak, discovery in the case involved dozens of depositions, the preparation of several expert reports, the review of millions of pages of documents, and countless other tasks. The work was done by a dedicated DOJ staff team. It was this team that built the foundation upon which the state AGs’ winning case was built. American consumers may never know their names, but they truly are the unsung heroes of the Live Nation case. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

Live Nation is a unicorn, but it does not have to be. Antitrust has in recent decades mostly been the domain of an elite and technocratic private bar, two federal enforcement agencies, and the federal bench. To many cognoscenti, bringing and winning an antitrust case of Live Nation’s scale and complexity before a jury at such short notice might seem like the triumph of hope over reason.  

And yet it worked. David beat Goliath.

Why, despite all these odds, did this happen? I believe it is because antitrust is a common sense, 80/20 issue for Americans. We invented antitrust, and we are innately good at it. You could say it’s baked into our DNA.  Americans believe in fairness, free markets, and capitalism, or at least most of us do. But how do we keep our markets from tilting to monopoly and oligopoly? You guessed it: We enforce our century-old antitrust laws. In fact, Americans are so good at antitrust, we have exported it all over the world.  In the 1990s, as Eastern European countries emerged from communism, Americans stepped in to help build not only free markets, but also antitrust agencies that looked something like our DOJ Antitrust Division. Many say that the internet was the great American export of the 21st century, and they are not wrong. But another great American export in our lifetimes is antitrust.

The jury in the Live Nation case proved just how innately good at antitrust Americans are if we’re let on to the playing field. Several pieces of evidence were introduced during trial, including chains of Slack messages sent between executives bragging about “taking advantage” of event ticket purchasers and gouging prices for ancillary services at their event venues. One of the executives who was in charge of ticketing described fans as “so stupid” and said the company was “robbing them blind, baby.”

Of course, these messages were not the only evidence presented at trial, but they gave the jury visibility into just how competition did or did not work in the market. If Live Nation operated under conditions of fierce competition, why would it be able to rob its customers blind? You get the point — it’s just common sense.

Because antitrust is an 80/20 issue for Americans, it by definition defies partisanship. For those of us interested in governing and not bickering, this is a good thing. Some issues call for us to be partisan. Antitrust does not. The winning state-AG coalition in the Live Nation case is living proof of this. The AGs applied common sense to the cards that were dealt when the DOJ dropped out, and worked together as Americans to fight on for consumers in both red and blue states. In so doing, they proved that a Tennessee or Texas trial lawyer can effectively connect with a Manhattan jury over a common interest in free, fair, and competitive markets. No one needed a Ph.D in economics to read those Slack messages, after all; as my husband says, “People kinda know when they are getting screwed.”

We are at an inflection point as a country. Many of our young people are opting out of capitalism and free markets. They are opting into socialism instead. As a conservative, I believe that socialism is not the path to Gen Z’s American dream. But as the mother of two Gen Z boys, I can hear the siren song of socialism, and it worries me. These kids are all right, but we need to give them hope and a newfound belief in the American dream. One way we can accomplish this is to make capitalism cool again. And we can start by making markets fairer and more competitive. In other words, we can start with antitrust enforcement.  

It’s the American way.