About the Book Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong

Show Me the Trillions
While  billions  of  people  derive  significant  value  from  these  firms  and  their
products,  disturbingly  few  reap  the  economic  benefits.  General  Motors
created  economic  value  of  approximately  $231,000  per  employee  (market
cap/workforce).
20
 This sounds impressive until you realize that Facebook has
created  an  enterprise  worth  $20.5 
million
  per  employee  …  or  almost  a

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hundred  times  the  value  per  employee  of  the  organizational  icon  of  the  last
century.
21
,
22
 Imagine the economic output of a G-10 economy, generated by
the population of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The economic value accretion seems to be defying the law of big numbers
and accelerating. In the last four years, April 1, 2013–April 1, 2017, the Four
increased in value by approximately $1.3 trillion (GDP of Russia).
23
,
24
Forbes,
 May, 2016. 
https://www.forbes.com/companies/general-motors/
Facebook, Inc. 
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
Yahoo! Finance. 
https://finance.yahoo.com/
Other  tech  companies,  old  and  new,  big  and  bigger,  are  losing  relevance.
Aging behemoths, including HP and IBM, barely warrant the attention of the
Four. Thousands of start-ups fly by like gnats hardly worth swatting at. Any
firm  that  begins  to  show  the  potential  to  bother  the  Four  is  acquired—at
prices lesser companies can’t imagine. (Facebook paid nearly $20 
billion
 for
five-year-old,  fifty-employee  instant  messaging  company  WhatsApp.)
Ultimately, the only competitors the Four face are … each other.

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Taplin, Jonathan. “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” 
The New York Times
.

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Soper, Spencer. “More Than 50% of Shoppers Turn First to Amazon in Product Search.”
Bloomberg.