On Wednesday, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet appeared before the US Congress, which has been studying hundreds of hours of interviews and more than 1.4 million documents as part of efforts to try to understand the business practices of these companies and their impact on innovation, competition and society. At least on this occasion we did not see a repeat of April 2018, when several members of Congress showed their ignorance of the basics of these companies’ business.
To begin with, these are four very different companies, but that between them add up to a market capitalization of almost $5 trillion, annual revenues of almost $800 billion, and a cash flow of almost $500 billion. They are among the most innovative companies in the world (Apple is the first, Alphabet the second, Amazon the third, and Facebook the tenth), and leaving out Microsoft, which will no doubt be very grateful for not being invited, they represent that group that has been called big tech, and that the pandemic has even benefited greatly: two of the four quizzed by Congress, who, in addition to being CEOs, are founders of their companies, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have seen their fortunes grow by up to 60% since mid-March, from $113 billion to $181 billion and from $55,000 to $86,000 respectively.
Making a lot of money is always synonymous with wrongdoing, although the business…
