So that leaves the investment. Then others are investing in all these tech companies.. it is a cyclic dependency graph if you trace through the millions of nodes (assuming you get through the offshore accounts which I presume function as sinks). Then ... these companies are getting huge valuations because everyone else is investing more and more into them? Including themselves investing into themselves ?? When does the buck stop? Doesn’t this wealth need to be backed up ultimately by some gold bars ? Even if it’s fiat and fractional reserve .. so someone’s trust rating is ultimately taking a hit? Is the us printing this money out of thin air on the back of it’s huge credit ? I know the economy is too complex to be boiled down like this but where are these 100x increases in billions coming from ultimately? People credit ratings summed over millions of people ?
I never took any Econ courses so admittedly my Econ is terrible.
Bloomberg isn’t claiming Sachin’s has surpassed the US completely. They’re making a comment based on trends.
Six of the ten richest people on earth are US tech billionaires.
Out of the 63 technology billionaires in the top 500 global richest that Bloomberg tracks in their billionaires list, 32 are in the US. China has 13.
Here's the breakdown of technology billionaires in the Bloomberg top 500 rich list by country (the list cuts off at $3.7b):
US 32, China 13, Germany 5, Canada 3, India 2, Japan 2, Australia 2, Brazil 1, South Korea 1, France 1, Taiwan 1
(Eduardo Saverin gets listed for Brazil, I'd probably list him for Singapore however)
Over time you realistically can't have a China with an economy the size of the US (the two economies will be larger than $30 trillion each before China reaches parity, assuming they ever do), without them having an enormous amount of tech wealth. The two will likely represent ~45% of the entire global economy in terms of output over the next few decades. In terms of millionaires, it'll be closer to 75% of all millionaires on earth between the two giants (the US by itself as of just a few years ago had about 45% of all millionaires; I assume China has taken a few more points in that time). The last problem the US has right now, is a concern about an upending of its tech wealth creation. Most of China's tech wealth is entirely isolated domestically, the US was never going to be allowed to own that market, and can't own that market going forward. China's tech companies can't own the US market and never will. It's the rest of the globe that is up for grabs, and the US will always win that battle because the rich liberal world trusts China drastically less than the US. So long as China retains its current system (as opposed to resuming the Deng liberalization path), that will remain true. Would I rather use business software from Salesforce (US) or Atlassian (AU) or SAP (Germany), or China? Or nearly any cloud software for that matter. Among the more liberal nations, that remains a very easy decision. China can't compete outside of its borders in most circumstances when data, speech/expression/social/media, privacy, etc. are involved.
Out of the top 100 software companies by sales in the world, the US currently has 73 of them.
Here's a short list of US tech companies which have either been founded or seen most of their growth over the last 10-15 years:
Facebook $477b, Salesforce $120b, Uber ~$80b-$120b, Airbnb ~$40b, Workday $41b, ServiceNow $41b, Square $30b, Stripe $23b, Twitter $23b, Palo Alto Networks $21b, Splunk $19b, Lyft $15b, Fortinet $14b, Pinterest $12b, Snap $12b, GoDaddy $12b, Twilio $11b, Dropbox $10b, Ultimate Software $10b, Okta $9b, Nutanix $9b, Zendesk $8b, DocuSign $8b, Grubhub $8b, Instacart $8b, Qualtrics $8b, Coinbase $8b, Slack $7b, Zillow $7b, Github $7b (acq), Proofpoint $6b, Zscaler $6b, Etsy $6b, Hubspot $6b, Tanium $6b, MuleSoft $6b (acq), Pivotal $5b, LogMeIn $5b, MongoDB $5b, Robinhood $5b, Carvana $5b, RealPage $5b, DoorDash $4b, Pure Storage $4b, Snowflake $4b, Alteryx $4b, Houzz $4b, Medidata $4b, Anaplan $4b, Credit Karma $4b, Qualys $4b, CarGurus, Box, Cloudera, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Stitch Fix, ZocDoc, Eventbrite, SendGrid, Reddit, Zuora, SecureWorks, etc.
You could add dozens of companies to that list. You could also split off AWS, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram as well, as large tech businesses whose growth has soared over the last decade. Netflix was a still small $3b company just ten years ago. Google has also seen the vast majority of its growth since ~2004-2005.
I don't see where there has been a slowdown or upending for the US in the last 10-15 years (which represents most of the China boom phase in terms of their value creation). China's expansion has been heavily isolated to its own territory when it comes to tech companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Ctrip, ByteDance, JD.com, Didi Chuxing, et al.), leaving the US free to continue doing what it has been in tech for decades without having to actually compete globally with China in most tech segments. Their tech expansion hasn't come at the expense of the US in other words.