One of my favourite films is WALL-E. It’s set in a distant future in which we have finally exhausted Earth’s resources and had to leave for life on a space ship until the planet can be cleaned up. At least, that’s what the passengers are told; generations later, few can recall what the original intention was, and our old home remains all but uninhabitable.
The new spacecraft is owned and run by Buy N Large – a huge conglomerate that dominated the terrestrial economy. Almost all dystopian stories feature corporations that grow to a vast size. (Are there any dystopian stories in which small enterprises are the dominant feature? Might be a cool idea to explore for a novel, actually!)
Watching these films or reading these stories, we sit back and think, “that’s neat, but not realistic, because obviously we would realise what’s happening and would surely act before one or two companies reach such vast scale like Buy N Large. Even the name is silly.”
WALL-E is set in 2804. But in 2024, Buy N Large is already here. The top three companies in the world are now worth over ten trillion dollars.
Take a moment to consider this.
$10 trillion
$10,000,000,000,000
Remember when you used to muck around with Casio pocket calculators as a kid? And put in ridiculously big numbers and multiply them and just see where you’d get to? (Maybe it was just me, but anyway!) The market cap of these companies will no longer fit on those calculators.
We become desensitised to these massive figures. When Apple was the first to hit $1 trillion it was a shock, but once we start thinking in “trillions”, $2 trillion or $3 trillion doesn’t seem like such a big deal, because our brains have simplified it to just 1 to 2 to 3. And after a while we’ve become completely disconnected from the galactic scale that these numbers refer to.
To help with perspective: these three companies are worth more than the entire stock markets of the UK, France and Germany combined.
Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA seem to fit the description in Azeem Azhar’s excellent book, Exponential, of companies that grow faster and more powerful as they scale.
In a few years, will I be writing one of these letters about the first company to hit $10 trillion by itself? And the first human to be worth $1 trillion?
Or will the letter begin with, “Remember the great AI bubble of 2024?”
I have no idea which way it will go.
We aren’t gamblers, nor do we run a hedge fund. Our goal is to cover as many squares on the board as possible and by doing so protect against major errors.
I resist thinking “we live in unprecedented times”, because most of the time, we don’t; we just have short memories and overweight recent history.
But I would be lying if I wasn’t at least a little bit afraid about what kind of world we are heading into, foretold by the ten trillion trio.
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