Alphabet Now A Trillion Dollar Company

Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash

It's the strangest thing to me how much a lot of people hate Capitalism when it's been Capitalism that lifted the world out of poverty. The other day I read that for the first time in history more than half the world is middle class or richer. This is a far cry from the days of feudal lords living in castles while the underlings cleared the land of rocks and served as the equivalent of indentured servants. The growth of a massive middle class in the past century is a story seldom celebrated.

The big complaint by employees in many American businesses today is not that they make too little, but that they make too much money so they can't afford to quit the job situations that they dislike. It's the story of golden handcuffs.

Alphabet is now a trillion dollar company, but not the first. Apple became the first in 2018. Followed by Microsoft and Amazon, the company everybody loves to hate.

I'll say this about Amazon. They did not start by selling books. They started by making is EASY to Buy books. To this day, the business is all about making it Easy and also making it Safe.

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So, what does a Trillion Dollars look like? I've seen visual representations in the past, and this one is exceedingly effective. (I used Google to find it, of course.) Here is what One Trillion Dollars looks like.

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Here's another way to look at it. If you spent one dollar every second, that would be $86,400 in 24 hours. At that rate you would spend $31.5 million a year. At that rate it would take you more than 32,000 years to spend a trillion.

To put THAT in perspective, the U.S. national debt is currently more than 17 trillion.

You have to wonder what kind of mojo keeps this machinery running.

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There is certainly a negative for every positive. The more we own, the more we have to manage. (This is also why it is not good to take over other countries, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's another story.)

America has a lot of poverty still, but we also have a lot of wealth. Only wealthy countries can have as many colleges and universities as we do. And as many lawyers, I suppose.

Individually, people own homes and cars and all manner of "toys" like boats and snowmobiles and motorcycles, garages and storage lockers full of junk. And more debt.

The downside of all this wealth (much of which we simply take for granted) is that the more we have, the more we have to lose. Also the more we own the more we have to worry about. Yet, somehow it seems like we're never quite satisfied.

Let's be careful about becoming envious of the billionaires, and assume an attitude of gratitude for what we have. Yes? No?

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There's more to say, but for now that's already been too much. Have a nice weekend.