The question is whether Washington has the appetite to control them before it’s too late.

Joel Kotkin writes,

Today we see the rise of a few companies, who have moved into virtually every aspect of our economy. The nerds of Silicon Valley are no longer just interested in gadgets to make life better but are seizing control of both the production and dissemination of information. Arguably the greatest beneficiaries of a pandemic that hooked people ever more on their products, the tech giants now have the capital to lead the drive into space and the forced march to electrical vehicles, while also looking into dominating more prosaic fields like healthcare and finance.

in the past few decades, the largest emerging corporate interests—Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon—and a handful of large financial institutions gained unprecedented control over the economy. By last summer six tech firms, including Tesla, accounted for half the value of the NASQAQ 100. By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined.

In virtually every key field— operating systems, social media, search, the cloud—a handful of firms now dominate. For example, Google and Apple account for nearly 90 percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft by itself controls 90 percent of all operating system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which comprises the vast majority of all ad sales.

Our new chieftains have no national allegiance. Today’s corporate hegemons see themselves not as national identities, but global ones. They don’t even depend much on our own education system: some 75 percent of Silicon Valley’s workforce are not even citizens. Many are H-IB indentured servants, “technocoolies,” brought in short-term contracts to do work they don’t have to pay Americans to do.

Virtually all our elite, particularly on Wall Street as well as Silicon Valley, is betting on China, and seem far less than interested in helping America, or liberal capitalism, stand up to autocracy than making ever more profits in the short-term. Their advocacy for “zero-carbon,” which will make energy far more expensive, reflects a priority expressive of both virtue signaling and an opportunity to make profits, even at national expense.

Donald Trump’s 2020 loss may have been caused by his far from adept handling of the pandemic, but also efforts heavily financed by tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on getting the desired electoral result. The oligarchs had many business reasons to detest both Trump and his loudly nationalist policies, and have openly boasted, as pointed out in Time (owned by Salesforce’s Mark Benioff) of their success in removing the former President.