Power Failure

The day before yesterday I finished listening to William Cohan's Power Failure in the car. Clocking in at over 28 hours long (I'm kind of surprised I made it through), Cohan retells the story of GE, and particularly more recent GE, first first in ascendancy under Jack Welch, then in slow decline under Jeffrey Immelt and his successors. 

Under Welch, of course, GE was corporate America's golden child, the company that could do no wrong. Then Immelt came in and first some of the sheen came off, then the financial crisis hit and shook GE's finance-heavy business model, then Immelt just continued to plain old fuck shit up.

Right now there is a sense in the markets that the Magnificent 7 (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Facebook, Tesla and Amazon) can do no wrong and will continue to dominate the universe of into the foreseeable future. How quickly we forget how power shifts in markets and everything comes to an end. Before the financial crisis it was all about Wall Street, then they fell. In the 60s it was the Nifty Fifty. Walmart had its day in the sun, as did Exxon. Even Enron once looked invincible.

For Big Tech to maintain its dominance forever, its masters will have needed to perfect the art of management so as not to be derailed by hubris and the errors in judgment that inevitably trail behind that sense of inevitability that surrounds them now. If we need any indication of the corruptibility of Big Tech, just gaze for a moment on this picture of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the woman for whom he left Mackenzie Scott. Say no more.