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It’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).
And the fact that these big software companies are more valuable than TSMC and ASML shows how stupid these evaluations are.
That 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.
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.
Sure, there are already alternatives for everything from these companies. But the material and mental costs of migration are not insignificant, so many people shy away from this migration, even though they would actually much rather say goodbye to these tech giants today already.