The Frightful Five.
If the US goes to war, it will not engage Ford, Boeing, General Motors and the big defense companies
It will enlist the Frightful Five.
Tech giants Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which make up half of the top 10 most valuable companies on the American stock market and which Manjoo says collectively influence just about everything else that happens in tech, as well as the rest of the global economy. He's also writing a book about the five.
FARHAD MANJOO:
So what makes them frightful, first of all, is that they are very, very big. And they play a huge role - they all play sort of huge roles in our lives kind of personally and at a kind of society-wide level. So if you live kind of a modern American life, it's impossible to, you know, to live without all of them for most people. And more than that, they sort of are being asked to do and they kind of know more about us than any corporations in history. They're more - they've become kind of more like governments than companies with the amount of money they have, with the kind of power they have over democracy in society.
We're seeing that with the way that, you know, news on Facebook and Google affected the election, with their impact on the economy, you know, the way they're disrupting kind of how retail works, with their impact on jobs and inequality. And eventually, you know, they're all working on artificial intelligence. And their technologies will affect probably most of our jobs. Most of the ways that people make money now are going to be changed by technologies that these companies make.
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