The Growing Influence of Mega Corporations

LOCATION & DAY: Johnny Pistolas in Adams Morgan on Wednesday. We will meet on the 1st floor by the back bar area.
The purpose of Thinkers and Drinkers is to facilitate casual but meaningful and interesting conversations with other people in a face-to-face setting. The topics cover a wide variety of issues and are different for every meeting. While conversations may get heated at times, we ask that all members be respectful of each other and refrain from personal insults.

Note: Please try to arrive on time, so we can start not long after 7 PM. (Also, happy hour ends at 7:30).
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Topic: The Growing Influence of Mega Corporations

The Movie/TV franchise "Alien" depicts a near-future dystopia where Earth is not ruled by governments, but by 5 supreme mega-corporations that control everything. While entirely fiction, a world where mega-corporations are more powerful than governments may not be as unrealistic as many would think.

Growth of Mega Corporations
In 1990, the largest company in the US, Exxon, had a market valuation of about $64 billion. This amount was about the same size as the GDP of tiny countries like Luxembourg or New Zealand at the time. But over the past 35 years, large corporations have outpaced the rest of the economy by huge margins.

Today, the largest company by market capitalization is Nvidia, valued at over $4.3 trillion. To put this figure into perspective, only three countries (the US, China, and Germany) have GDPs greater than this amount.

With this economic power comes political influence, and companies have used this to their advantage in both the US and abroad to gain special treatment.

• Apple convinced Ireland to defend its low-tax deal against the EU’s €13B ruling because of its economic importance.
• Amazon triggered a bidding war where U.S. cities offered billions in subsidies to host its HQ2.
• Google threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia to pressure lawmakers over a news-payment law.
• NVIDIA's CEO made a special deal with Trump to allow the company to sell its chips in China in exchange for 15% of revenue.

Looking forward, there does not appear to be any movement or legislation that will limit the growth of these corporations. On the contrary, advances in AI and other industries that require huge amounts of capital to start, like space development, are projected to continue to outpace the rest of the global economy.

Fall of Previous Mega Corporations
This is not the first time in history that corporations have been as powerful as certain governments. The Dutch East India Trading Company (VOC) famously controlled territory and had its own navy. During the Gilded Age in the early 1900s, companies like Standard Oil had tremendous influence to crush its competitors and even alter US foreign policy.

Eventually, all previous mega-corporations met their end. The VOC met its end through war with Britain, and the mega-corporations like Standard Oil were broken up by the US government. Other mega-corporations from the Gilded Age like US Steel, the first $ 1 billion company, slowly lost their influence as rivals and industry trends slowed their growth to a crawl.

Questions to Consider:

• Should governments take more action to limit the power of mega-corporations?
• Is the concern about mega-corporations' influence overstated?
• How does growth in private military contractors (PMCs) or mercenaries play into this topic?
• Do people, as individuals, have stronger loyalties to their company (or pocketbook) than to the country they live in?

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