InnerworldWorld’s Most Valuable Companies (2026)
artifexIt’s kind of interesting to think about which of these - and how many, for that matter - could disappear tomorrow and there’d be almost no difference. If meta just vanished then… nothing would change. Even nvidia, if it just popped out of existence, would barely be noticed by most people, I think (assuming all their installed hw didn’t vanish along with them).
HalcyonThat doesn’t make sense to me. While it’s true that most people do not have a conscious contact point with these companies on a daily basis, large portions of our modern societies would face a breakdown at least after several weeks, if these companies disappeared tomorrow.
Even if the hardware and structures would stay - the companies are needed to run and maintain that. Each of these companies has several ten thousand employees, they surely would notice a difference for a start, I guess.
For something like Nvidia, where their products run real infrastructure, yes. But Meta? People would have to move from WhatsApp to something else as the biggest issue.
Moving from WhatsApp to a different messenger, that’s already a big issue even today.
Here in Europe, there is a significant exodus of people who want to leave all Meta products behind because they do not support Meta’s close ties to the Trump/MAGA government or other reprehensible behaviors of these tech giants.
However, many people, especially older people, have difficulty with such a change, simply because they lack technical knowledge. Many also fear losing their network during such a move.
The psychological costs of such a migration shouldn’t be underestimated. There’s a lot of social inertia.
Cory Doctorow @[email protected] has described in detail the specifics and background of how people are held hostage on these tech platforms.
Cory Doctorow (@[email protected])
100K Posts, 964 Following, 74.2K Followers · By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @[email protected]. Archived at pluralistic.net I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.
There’s a little bit of hyperbole, but aside from the obvious things like job loss at those respective companies, in a lot of these cases their valuations are wildly disproportionate to their actual value to society (and not just in a SJW way, but in a literal way). Take the nvidia case - yes they’re baked into a lot of systems that would be problematic to replace. But if 90% of their value is coming from AI – which didn’t exist 5 years ago and isn’t really necessary (let alone mission-critical) for anything right now – it could just evaporate, we’d be left with a much smaller or disappeared nvidia, and few would be worse off for it. Tesla’s another good one. Their valuation is ridiculously out of whack with their deliverables (cars and energy systems). It could go poof and dozens of other vendors trading at more reasonable valuations and with extremely similar portfolios of products could sweep in to fill whatever latent demand there might still be.