This is a special post for quick takes by leogao. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
it's actually insane how much of the entire economy is tech now. somewhere in the back of my head i still expected traditional "big" industries like big oil, or the banks, or whatnot to be the biggest. but i just realized this hasn't been true for a long time.
I think the top 3 were still tech companies 10 years ago, and 5 out of 10 were already there so this doesn't seem new? It's just how much room they've had to grow that's been surprising IMO.
Here's the top 3 as of 2016 (AI researched)
Top 3 companies by market capitalization (Q1 2016)
Apple — ~$604 billion
Alphabet (Google) — ~$518 billion
Microsoft — ~$437 billion
Facebook / Amazon were also in the top 10. It's mostly been them expanding ~10x from there in market cap.
I'm trying to figure out how much political power AI has by virtue of being a big chunk of the economy. clearly, oil and gas have enough power to stop climate regulations. it seems like AI is already roughly as big as oil and gas (and tech as a whole much larger than oil and gas)
2yams
I was thinking about the other comments and their technical correctness re conflating the economy and the stock market / how much that correction of your OP actually matters for your area of concern.
Im actually very confused about what [number associated with a business or sector] tracks most closely with [political power] or [potential political power]. Market cap doesn’t look like a crazy place to start, but my guess is that there‘s something better (and I agree with the point that market cap likely overweights tech for this purpose).
