Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft all reported record-breaking profits amid a pandemic bonanza.
In back-to-back corporate earnings releases Google, Apple and Microsoft all reported record-breaking quarterly sales and profits. Facebook doubled its profits and reported its fastest growth in five years. In the last three months alone the US’s five largest tech companies made combined profits of over $68bn.
In the last three months, Amazon’s sales have averaged over $1.2bn a day. On Thursday Amazon announced a $7.8bn profit after sales that topped $100bn for the third quarter in a row. It took the company less than four seconds to earn the $52,000 the average American makes in a year.
Apple is now sitting on nearly $200bn in cash.
Money has poured into super-powerful corporations controlled by a handful of super-rich, plutocrats with wealth unseen in human history.
This week the combined fortune of the richest seven billionaires, all big tech titans, passed $1tn for the first time, according to the Institute of Policy Studies’ (IPS) Inequality tracking project.
And alongside all that cash comes political power and the means to fight any official or government that challenges them.
“We are looking at a Blade Runner future, a world where a handful of companies will dominate all economic activity,” said Chuck Collins, senior scholar at IPS. “We are creating a political and corporate oligarchy that is fundamentally against a healthy democracy and competition,” said Collins.
The structure of the digital economy is likely to create a “winner takes all” scenario.
“Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering,” antitrust expert Tim Wu, a Columbia University professor, wrote in his 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
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