He frets about this stuff. He interrupted my breakfast on Tuesday to tell me that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has just reached four trillion dollars in market capitalisation, joining Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft.
Each of these four companies is bigger than the United Kingdom economy and only exceeded by the United States, China, Germany, Japan and India. Nvidia, the chipmaker, has now pipped India too.
All of them are far bigger than the Australian economy — as is Amazon, while Facebook’s owner, Meta, is close at $1.6 trillion. Australia’s GDP is around $1.81 trillion.
Even the best bred dogs in the park never dreamed of that kind of dominance; we’re satisfied with an extra Schmacko and a cool spot to lie down.
The Boss found it unedifying to watch the CEOs of all these companies kissing The Donald’s ring, along with Elon Musk. (His Tesla is worth a mere $1 trillion, but Elon is about to clean up with another trillion this year when he floats his Space X, which owns Starlink.)
Musk hit the news last week when it was revealed his xAI assistant, Grok, was permitting users to undress images of children on the internet; when the UK government threatened new laws to ban it, Musk threatened them back.
So he throws his weight around. What do you humans expect? Once upon a time, the internet smelled like freedom: a world of connectivity, creativity and conversation. It was supposed to be a dog park for everyone.
The promise was having no more bossy people running the show, no more gatekeepers: just a paradise of unfenced paddocks and rabbits to chase. But after three decades of “democratising technology”, you’ve managed to shrink power down to a handful of huge companies.
Look at it now. Four movie studios still control Hollywood. Three record labels own the hits, and two companies control most music streaming. Google commands 90 per cent of search. Amazon controls around 40 per cent of online shopping, and four streaming platforms control two-thirds of home movie watching. Their obscenely wealthy CEOs are hell-bent on accumulating more.
The Boss finds it hard to see what good they are doing. At least the wealthy Medici in old Italy patronised the arts because they wanted immortality, whereas Bezos and Musk seem more interested in getting to Mars to avoid taxes — climate change.
He reckons it’s all about investor returns and feeding the AI gold rush, rather than nourishing the social fabric. Where the Medicis funded Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, we have the tech titans planning trips in space and bigger yachts — and we see Mark Zuckerberg in a virtual reality headset claiming he’s “building community”.
But is The Boss going to cancel his streaming subscriptions and smash his smartphone in protest? Not likely.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bury the only data I have. I prefer mine cached in the old-fashioned way — under a tree, not in the cloud. But I penned this column on a device made by one tech giant, stored on servers owned by another, to be read on platforms controlled by a third. I regret nothing. Woof!
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