In August 2018, financial reporters around the globe became extremely
excited at news that the tech company Apple had passed the $1 trillion
mark in terms of its market capitalisation, the value of all its shares at
that time. The BBC announced that it was “the first public company
worth $1 trillion”, remarking that its shares had risen by more than
50,000 per cent since it had first been listed in 1980. Likewise, The
Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fortune, and many others remarked its
status as the most highly valued company, at that time the most exclusive club in the world with one member, although on 4 September,
Amazon briefly joined before dropping down to a mere $995 billion.
1
The more carefully written of these stories tended to mention that this
trillion-dollar record referred to a “publicly-owned” or “US” company,
as Apple would at best be the second trillion-dollar company in history.
As Forbes writer Lucinda Shen pointed out the previous November, the
state-owned oil and gas producer, PetroChina, had briefly topped the
magical mark on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2007.
2
PetroChina
also saw the biggest-ever stock market losses, with some $800 billion –
or approximately the size of Italy’s stock market in 2017 – being wiped
off its shareholder value. Incredible drops in oil prices, combined with
plans to move towards alternative sources of power in China and a
clampdown on excessive swings in Chinese stocks in the aftermath of
the 2007 global financial crisis demonstrated the fragile nature of such
high-risk speculation.
It is no accident that a book on tech giants, artificial intelligence and
journalism begins not with innovation and ideas but with the effect of
share prices. In the business world, the value of the major technology
companies is extremely significant news and, in many quarters, reporting about technology is synonymous with financial journalism. In March
2017, Fortune ran a piece that is typical of the speculative opinion pieces
familiar to anyone interested in such stories, betting on whether it would
be Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Microsoft, or Tesla that would hit the trillion-dollar mark first.
3
With
the exception of Tesla (whose name is only featured here because its charismatic but sometimes erratic founder, Elon Musk, suggested it), these
Introduction
Automatic for the People
excited at news that the tech company Apple had passed the $1 trillion
mark in terms of its market capitalisation, the value of all its shares at
that time. The BBC announced that it was “the first public company
worth $1 trillion”, remarking that its shares had risen by more than
50,000 per cent since it had first been listed in 1980. Likewise, The
Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fortune, and many others remarked its
status as the most highly valued company, at that time the most exclusive club in the world with one member, although on 4 September,
Amazon briefly joined before dropping down to a mere $995 billion.
1
The more carefully written of these stories tended to mention that this
trillion-dollar record referred to a “publicly-owned” or “US” company,
as Apple would at best be the second trillion-dollar company in history.
As Forbes writer Lucinda Shen pointed out the previous November, the
state-owned oil and gas producer, PetroChina, had briefly topped the
magical mark on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2007.
2
PetroChina
also saw the biggest-ever stock market losses, with some $800 billion –
or approximately the size of Italy’s stock market in 2017 – being wiped
off its shareholder value. Incredible drops in oil prices, combined with
plans to move towards alternative sources of power in China and a
clampdown on excessive swings in Chinese stocks in the aftermath of
the 2007 global financial crisis demonstrated the fragile nature of such
high-risk speculation.
It is no accident that a book on tech giants, artificial intelligence and
journalism begins not with innovation and ideas but with the effect of
share prices. In the business world, the value of the major technology
companies is extremely significant news and, in many quarters, reporting about technology is synonymous with financial journalism. In March
2017, Fortune ran a piece that is typical of the speculative opinion pieces
familiar to anyone interested in such stories, betting on whether it would
be Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Microsoft, or Tesla that would hit the trillion-dollar mark first.
3
With
the exception of Tesla (whose name is only featured here because its charismatic but sometimes erratic founder, Elon Musk, suggested it), these
Introduction
Automatic for the People