The spectacular dominance of America’s Magnificent Seven tech firms – with $1 trillion-plus market caps – has been a marvel to behold and a genuine source of American pride. This is a theme that both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have in celebration of American business prowess.
The Magnificent Seven companies – Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla – have a combined net worth greater than all the companies in Europe. Now that’s Chiefs-versus-Eagles dominance.
The mystery is why many regulators in Washington view these digital-age companies, whose continued rocket-ship growth has created hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs for Americans, as villains, not heroes. They keep calling for a blanket of smothering regulations via antitrust laws to rein in their market power.
Now we have lawyers and lawmakers in Europe taking action to slam the brakes on these companies. It would be like the government calling on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to stop writing so many hit records because it isn’t fair to all the other bands.
These court actions are particularly pernicious because the cost of internet services, search engines, cellphones, online shopping, artificial intelligence, and electric vehicles has come down, but the courts and the lawyers say that they are crowding out the smaller startups. The sharks are apparently swallowing up the minnows.
But this whole “break up” Big Tech mentality advanced on the left and the right is particularly misguided because the tech industry of 2025 is characterized by thousands of smaller and often more nimble “little tech” companies that compete with each other and Big Tech, providing exciting catalogs of new products.
A competitive tech sector is characterized by a healthy mix of established, scaled firms alongside smaller, nimbler firms – both working together and competing with each other to innovate and deliver for their customers.
On the back of recent breakthroughs in everything from AI to robotics to self-driving cars, tech companies of all sizes coexist in a vast and vibrant race to the top. Out of this ecosystem will surely emerge a new generation of monster hits as transformational as Steve Jobs’ personal computer and the first Google search engine.
Out of these thousands of startups will emerge the next generation of Googles and Apples. If history is any guide, it’s a good bet that, sometime in the years ahead, the young upstarts will knock the big guys off their exalted perches. We don’t worry too much anymore about AOL dominating the internet, nor Intel dominating microchip production.
Think about today’s high-rising titans. Raise your hand if you had heard of Nvidia or OpenAI five years ago.
Big firms incubate the talent that starts small firms. Former employees of America’s tech leaders often go on to start their own hugely successful businesses. OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba worked at Meta. YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees. A former Tesla employee co-founded the news and opinion platform Substack.
Former Googlers have created over 2,000 startups, including Inflection AI, Adept AI, Cohere, Perplexity AI, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. And 14 out of the world’s 50 most successful AI startups were founded by former Google employees. Larger firms play a key role in incubating tech talent and ideas, catalyzing new startups and innovation that benefit consumers and the wider economy.
How many times have you heard the complaint that American companies are too short-term oriented and don’t look past the next quarterly report? Then how is it that Google invests more than $10 billion a year in research and development? Why is it that Meta has invested over $46 billion since 2021 into Reality Labs, focusing on building augmented reality and virtual reality?
Many of the breakthrough achievements of the next decade are just as likely to come from venture capital-funded startups that no one has heard of today. In Silicon Valley, these disruptive upstarts like OpenAI are known as unicorns. As of 2024, the world had more than 1,400 unicorns, over half of which were founded in the United States.
Why is “little tech” housed in Silicon Valley and other American tech corridors like Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City? Because they feed off the creativity and dynamism of a risk-taking venture capital ecosystem that is nowhere else in the world to be found.
Federal regulators and the antitrust cops are the poisonous disrupters of these capitals of innovation. The ethos of Washington is: You can succeed and grow and become profitable – but not too much. If this anti-success attitude is allowed to prevail, the casualties won’t be the Magnificent Seven but the next generation of trillion-dollar companies. Oh, they will come. Just not from America.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, co-authored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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Will small tech companies still exist in 10 years? Or will they be swallowed up by the big 7. Small mom and pop stores have disappeared from the cities and towns. Local restaurants come and go or just go. Local gas station owner or repair garage is not owned locally. There are more foreign car dealerships than American car dealerships. Big warehouse stores also have gone by the wayside. Sears, Montgomery Wards, JC Penney’s, Mervin’s, KMart, and many others the current generation never knew off. Many are standing on bankruptcy Joann, Kohls and others have closed like BB&B, why is that? One word Amazon. The COVID scare made everyone obey the mandates to buy on line. We were good little sheep and Bezos can afford another balloon or super yacht. What is to say that in 10 years Meta won’t own all the tech companies, unicorns included. Or Apple or Microsoft. We found out in 2020 these companies can buy an election. It almost happened again in 2024. But more persons were awake and thinking and decided no more DEI presidents. They voted for one who had merit and could actually do the job. Now the dems complain, what happened? They blame their base, no that wasn’t it, they blame Russia, no that wasn’t it, they blame the culture, nah that wasn’t it either. What was it then. The people of America saw through their plan of hatred for people that did not agree with their plans for the govt. These wanted free speech and free exchange of ideas. They wanted to decide for themselves where to live, what church to attend. Wanted to raise their children, not the teachers. Trans ideology should not be taught in school. Drag queens have no business to dance for first graders. Banning dr Zeus’s books because they were racist. But books about oral sex and gay sex was okay. Spending tax dollars in foreign countries on these subjects is okay. DOGE has to go. Why because those that benefitted from this largesse want to keep it. Who are screaming the loudest. The senators and members of the House on the dems side. DOGE is auditing the govt books for the people. It’s not the congress money, it’s the peoples money. Everyone who is entitled to a govt payment will still get it. The progressives hatred for people who oppose their world plan are delegates of Satan. They won’t stop until they have made all of us into sheep. Take Margaret Brennan and her Question to Marco Rubio to see where their mind is at. She was absolutely giddy asking that question. She really thought she had found the Holy Grail. To me it showed the narcissistic thinking of the progressives, lack of education and total hatred for those that don’t agree with their policies.
Yeah! When I got into the tech field in the early 80s PCs weren’t around yet, let alone cell phones. Programming was done on big IBM mainframes! I remember one of my professors saying tech was moving so fast that we would all have computers in the palm of our hands before long! Well I’m typing this on my cell phone! There’s no telling what’s in store in the near future! I want my Jetson copter before I get too old to fly it! Or a colonoscopy with a wand like Star Trek!
…but, the “democrats” want to “regulate” ALL successful companies… in the way of, simply, stealing from them, for the sake of their own opulent, very exclusive, lifestyles… without providing a single iota of value to… anyone.
President Trump is made of the ” Right Stuff” to paraphrase fighter pilots of WW2.
This is interesting but bothers this old baby boomer as I still like companies that produce a product. How much to these Seven contribute to our GNP ?
The Magnificent Seven ? Two words – Digital Equipment. Wang. Kodak. Xerox. And on and on. Two more words – Natural Selection. Anybody ever hear of this outfit called Intel ?
Little Tech wont censor US
Rise or fall based on your product, honesty, attitude, services, honor, and other condcting quality business practices. Gettiing Lawyers to spin the wheel is disgusting and all about fees and making profit.
Until they invent an affordable cybertronic pleasure unit… I’m not impressed!
As a person who worked in software development corporations in the R&D part for 10 years, I am not for unnecessary regulations. However, there can be a dark side to technology and we shouldn’t just look at numbers and who is first in the race.
I have a deep concern over AI. There are many, many benefits but, there are many, many drawbacks too. For example, in education, all a student has to do is attach a document to AI that is part of their assignment, click on AI and it reads the document, and then the student can ask AI anything they want to get an answer and AI spits it out for them. The student doesn’t learn anything but gets a great grade for the assignment. We will have the dumbest people on earth within less than a generation.
We are already losing the education race worldwide. We rank 44 in the world now and are sinking lower each year where we once were first in everything. My thought is to go slower on this and to be mindful of both sides of the equation.
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