There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet.

Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.