Rockefeller's wealth was ~420 billion (inflation adjusted) at its peak. That's significantly more than Bezos and Gates combined. So no, Standard Oil won't look like a lifestyle business compared to FAANG giants. You can make a point without using hyperbole.

> also control the infrastructure running a huge portion of the internet

AWS has less market share than Microsoft. The Cloud is a pretty competitive space.

> are working on creating a new ISP

This is great, look what Google Fiber did to fiber availability in the US. More competition is great in this space.

I find it ironic that you're complaining about FAANGs in the context of ISPs, who control literal monopolies in several regions.

Well actually, Standard Oil peak market cap was about $1 trillion. Rockefeller owned about 25% of this. The rest of Rockefeller's wealth came from the rise in share values post-split. Standard Oil at it's peak actually had lower market cap than any of Apple(2.5T), Google(1.7T), Amazon(1.9T), Microsoft(2.1T) have today, and is about on par with Facebook (1T).

FAANG is huge and market caps already greatly exceed that of the old-school monopolies.

It is fair to say this is quite distorted by the impact of very low interest rates on expectations of future profits though, which is a key component in the share price.

The parent comment was using Rockefeller's peak net worth as compared to FAANG CEO's net worths to show that FAANG is smaller than Standard Oil was. I mainly wanted to point out that if you instead compare company valuations, each of FAANG is bigger.

Also, at it's peak Standard Oil was worth about 6% of the US stock market. Apple is currently worth 5.3%. This comparison should be robust to differences in interest rates. In this light, Apple is slightly smaller than Standard Oil was. But, the market is broader now and there are more lines of business in existence. So a company that dominates an entire line of business would be expected to have a lower proportion of total stock market cap now than in 1910.

At the very least 2021 Apple and 1910 Standard Oil are very comparable in size. There might not be a clear way to tell which is bigger.

>AWS has less market share than Microsoft. The Cloud is a pretty competitive space.

They didn't say a "majority" though, they just said a huge portion.

In the context of the internet and how many devices are out there, I think he would absolutely be right in saying "a huge portion."

> AWS has less market share than Microsoft. The Cloud is a pretty competitive space.

According to gartner[0] AWS has over double Azure’s market share by revenue.

What metric are you using for your stat?

[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-06-2...

Microsoft likes to throw around cloud figures that include Office 365 to make their market share sound bigger in comparison with AWS.

"Rockefeller's wealth was ~420 billion (inflation adjusted) at its peak."

Dumb question. Why do people use inflation? Like Rockefeller would take the cash and put in a %2.5 account for 100 years? He probably would have put it in an investment at minimum gaining %7-10 account for 100 years - giving him multiple trillions.

Because the point is to give an apples-to-apples comparison of the value represented. It’s not Rockefeller’s fortune and it’s growth that’s interesting but rather how many Big Macs his fortune could buy in 1921 vs how much that many Big Macs would cost in 2021.

But they were comparing Amazon to STD oil, not Bezos (diluted in divorce) to Rockefeller. Rockefeller owned a full third, Bezos 11%, Gates 1% (but similar foundation setup to Rockefeller maybe, and at one point was 49% or something, but of a much smaller MS than today).

Even if you factor in investment returns you're not getting the full picture IMO unless you take into account price increases over time as well.

A common refrain is that Carnegie Hall only cost $1M ($29,581,868.13 when adjusted for inflation) to build, so why do we still credit its founder with their name? Shouldn't we rename it in honor of someone who's contributed more to the Hall?

What this doesn't take into account is what it would cost to _build_ a new Carnegie Hall today. Labor is far more expensive (highest $/hr ever in 2019 if I'm not mistaken [1]) today and so are building materials [2].

So it's true he'd see compounding returns from investing, but to do what they did back then would cost significantly more today. IE, their dollars took them further back then.

Also, worth noting Rockefeller donated 6% of his salary to charity every pay check every single year of his life, not just when he could "afford" it [3]. So if you take into account the _missed_ compound returns of those charitable contributions, you can start to get a sense for just otherworldly their charitable efforts were.

Not trying to say these guys were angels. And yet, as rich as they were, I think too often that overshadows the gargantuan contributions to charity they made.

[1](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/02/are-wages-increasing...) [2](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-price-in...) [3](https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/people/hall-o...)

> And yet, as rich as they were, I think too often that overshadows the gargantuan contributions to charity they made.

Is it really such a great thing to give away money you don't need. IMO tha should be the absolute minimum baseline expectation for someone who controls so much wealth.

I think it is a great thing. They could just as easily keep it all to themselves and pass it down to generations. It’s fully within their legal rights to do so.

> Why do people use inflation?

Because it is very hard to think about the currency values in terms of purchasing power.

Inflation is the lowest metric in that count, but reflects a somewhat uniform drop in purchasing power (per dollar) across the whole market.

My friend's mom told me her mortgage for a Bay Area house was 75$ a month, the two cars parked in front were worth more than a 2 bed house when she got the cars.

So it was much cheaper to buy a house, but much more expensive to get a car and I can't even have a ballpark figure for what a gigabyte of computer memory would have cost in 1971.

So, inflation adjustment is at best a rough proxy for purchasing power at current costs.

It's because the question isn't "how much money would Rockefeller have now if he'd time traveled while his investments sat there," it's "how much did he have relative to today's wealthy" and the easiest comparison point we have there is to inflation-adjust and compare that to our existing mental feeling for "how rich is Bezos."

I don't know why people are downvoting this. I want to say thank you for taking the time and asking a question, and for actively making an effort to understand something better. I hope the downvotes don't dissuade you (or anyone else) from asking questions in the future.

Because it helps the average person get a sense of scale - instead of saying '100 million, but that's 5 times ore than....' you just do the inflated number and people get a better sense of scale.

Presumably to compare purchasing power. Your investment idea actually distorts the comparison since it involves additional labor and wealth creation.

I prefer fraction of total global wealth as the units. it’s hard to get good estimates though.

Walmart sells a lot more stuff than Amazon. People over estimate the size of Amazon and total retail sales.

Amazon has higher retail sales than Walmart?

Yes, Amazon does more retail sales than Walmart. Their "revenue" is only 15% on all third party sales, which are now more than half of total sales on the platform. They don't report on total sales on the platform on purpose to avoid drawing attention to the fact that they are bigger than Walmart.

I think amazon may have higher total sales on its platform, but like 60% of their sales are actually sold by other marketplace sellers, not Amazon.

Walmart meanwhile does also have a marketplace, but I think still sells the overwhelming majority of their stuff direct in their physical stores.

Remember Walmart has revenue of like 600 billion a year or something crazy.

Shopify for comparison is almost half the size of Amazon Marketplace but on trajectory to match it in the next two years.

But that 15% that amazon takes (not counting the extra cut they take for Fulfilled by Amazon items) is larger than Walmart's average markup. So that isn't really an argument against their size.

That question mark is confusing

If you have to ask what it symbolizes - it doesn't

I'm not confused by it, though I'm a native English speaker and live in an English speaking country and spend most of my internet time on English speaking internet, so maybe that's why

They are creating an ISP, but how successful is it going to be? The clear leader in satellite Internet constellations is SpaceX Starlink, and Kuiper compares poorly to what Starlink offers. SpaceX is going to have a bigger constellation. SpaceX already has a bigger constellation – over 1600 satellites in orbit, compared to zero launched yet for Kuiper. SpaceX has a huge advantage in having their own launch vehicles (Falcon 9, with Starship under development). Amazon has to rely on third party launch providers, and it isn't willing to choose SpaceX (SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell has said they are happy to launch competitors' constellations, but obviously Amazon doesn't want to fund its main competitor). For now it has chosen ULA, but ULA costs significantly more than SpaceX, and with Starship the gap is going to become even bigger. Amazon's other major option is Blue Origin – which, although owned by Bezos, is not an Amazon company – but while Blue Origin's launch system New Glenn is competitive on paper with SpaceX's (being in between Falcon 9 and Starship in capability), its maiden launch probably isn't until 2023 at the earliest. I think it is likely that Starship will be launching Starlink satellites before New Glenn is launching Kuiper.

starlink won't scale and everyone knows it.

At most, starlink can replace one tmobile.

amz seem to be buying into everything under the sun and trumpling usage agreements (i.e. "reselling" consumer broadband with people joining via dark-patterns despite it being against their ISP terms of service, via amz sidewalk product)... and that can scale up to O.G. Bell levels of monopoly.

If Starlink won't scale, Kuiper won't scale even moreso. FCC has approved 12,000 satellites for SpaceX, and another 30,000 are going through the approval process. Project Kuiper has only applied for a 3,236 satellite constellation. And SpaceX is way ahead on deployment, and is likely to stay ahead.

Other than Kuiper, Amazon has shown no signs of becoming a serious player in the consumer ISP space. Sidewalk is not a consumer ISP service in its own right, it needs to piggyback on a third-party consumer ISP service. Amazon is nowhere near becoming anything resembling Bell.

The number of satellites is an extremely poor metric for capacity. A single GEO satellite has more USA capacity than about 900 LEOs

Don't you mean to say coverage, not capacity?

Capacity would be aggregate bandwidth, which is determined by the satellite's communications technology (number of transponders, spectrum allocated, modulation used, etc) rather than directly by which orbit it is in.

Comparing constellation sizes does make sense in determining total capacity (aggregate bandwidth of the constellation) assuming that Starlink and Kuiper use similar capacity satellites. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but we have limited info on what Kuiper are planning. Current Starlink satellites have on average 20 GBps capacity each. I can't find any public info on the planned capacity of Kuiper's satellites. Even if Kuiper has higher bandwidth satellites, they'd need a fourfold advantage in bandwidth to overcome Starlink's fourfold advantage in satellite count. And SpaceX is likely to increase the capacity of Starlink in future iterations, so even if Kuiper did have such a bandwidth advantage, it might not last.

Both. I specifically said the USA because that's where they're going to make the most money, and at a given time only about 10% of their satellites are over it.

The satellite capability is one thing, but spectrum is another. SpaceX doesn't have priority on a lot of the spectrum they have, so it might be completely unusable by the time they go live.

Is Kuiper's spectrum situation any better than Starlink's? From what I've read, Starlink and OneWeb have priority over Kuiper for the same spectrum (since they were approved first).

I feel like we are arguing two different things. I was saying Kuiper can't beat Starlink. You are arguing Starlink is not going to succeed. I'm more optimistic about its prospects than you are, but even if you are right, it wouldn't change my original point – if both fail, then Kuiper still doesn't beat Starlink.

How can you say this? Starlink is in beta and nowhere near the full capacity they need to sustain the business.

My main point was they are way ahead of Kuiper, which is obviously true. SpaceX has launched over 1600 satellites, Kuiper has launched zero so far. SpaceX has launched over 700 satellites so far this year. SpaceX has a public beta in multiple countries. Kuiper can't have even a private beta since they haven't launched anything yet.

I think you're overestimating what it takes to catch up here. There are no contracts. If one is better than the other, people will cancel their service and switch at the drop of a hat.

For Kuiper to catch up they need to solve their launch systems gap with Starlink. I think you're underestimating how hard it is going to be for them to close that gap.

Blue origin has been at it for a while. While kuiper is new, blue origin is not.

Kuiper and Blue Origin are independent companies. Amazon owns Kuiper. Amazon does not own Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos owns that independently of Amazon. Despite having some ownership in common, they are legally required to operate at arms length.

Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX, and yet has achieved far less than SpaceX has in the same timeframe despite a two year head start. Over that timeframe, SpaceX has successfully delivered 124 Falcon 9 payloads to orbit. Blue Origin hasn't sent anything to orbit yet, New Glenn is targeted to "late 2022" but most observers think it won't launch until 2023 (or even later).

Blue Origin is the one that needs to prove itself here. SpaceX has a proven capacity to deliver payload to orbit. With Starship, that capacity is going to greatly increase. But even if Starship runs into trouble and gets delayed, they still have a proven capacity with Falcon 9 to rely on while any issues with Starship gets delayed. Blue Origin is working through the issues on New Glenn without any fallback.

They operate independently, but both are funded by bezos. They don't need to be owned by the same company. They need to both be good at their respective goals and cheap launches will follow.

But to be clear, none of this matters. The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.

> They need to both be good at their respective goals and cheap launches will follow.

Is Blue Origin good at its goals? On New Glenn, which is what matters here (not New Shepard), the jury is still out. By contrast, for Falcon 9, the jury returned a verdict long ago.

> The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.

They say they've been cutting the manufacturing cost from $3000 to $1500 to $1000; you are assuming they aren't going to succeed in cutting it further. Even if they can't get it all the way down to $500 (the current sticker price), if they can get it down to $600 or $700, a $100-$200 price rise for new customers caused by withdrawing the subsidy is unlikely to be a huge issue. (The $300 figure was just an aspirational goal Musk set, nobody is paying that little right now, who knows if anyone ever will.)

None other then Elon musk says they need $20-30B in investments to stay afloat recently. They are nowhere near where it needs to be for the terminal cost. The launches can be free and the business will still sink without more government subsidies.

Doesn't Biden plan to go big on anti trust laws?

Some stuff I read sounded rather bleak for the likes of FAANG.

Politicians' plans and politicians' accomplishments tend to be vastly different things.

We're starting to get some political alignment on anti-trust against Amazon at least. Though one party seems motivated by worker/consumer right, the other by retaliation for Bezos' ownership of WaPo.

Considering Bezos is hardly involved with Amazon anymore it’ll be hard to tie WaPo into its antitrust case.

Do they need to tie WaPo into whatever antitrust may hit Amazon? As long as it's hurting Jeff Bezos, I'm sure some will be happy about it.

I fully expect Amazon's lobbying arms to be able to exploit that sort of ideological split.

It would be very easy for Bezos to divest WaPo or tilt its coverage more conservative to buy off an anti-trust issue.

lol.

So; how did antitrust work out for Bell? Not too terribly bad, in the long run. (Though there were huge benefits for us consumers. . . )

The various Standard Oil split results had some nice successes, too.

Honestly I'm not sure of the main corporate opposition to anti-trust other than ego and/or laziness. It'll force the resulting business to get even better. If you got your position by being the best, you can still be the best in the new world.

This is basic infrastructure/utility and should be run by the government (with companies as contractors).

I was recently looking at getting starlink. During my research I got a good chuckle at the realization that it’s more cost effective for SpaceX to launch thousands of satellites into space for starlink then it is for someone to dig a goddamn hole to provide adequate service.

Even slightly rural places it’s not cost effective for traditional isps to dig a cable so what’s the markets solution? Launch thousands of satellites! I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. The market has failed, requiring external forces to intervene(the government). Whether it be Title 2ing them or allowing municipal competition something needs to happen

Yes. It should absolutely become less agile, over-regulated, more expensive, and less convenient.

Don't forget that government institutions invented the internet, then companies messed it up.

lmao?

'messed it up'- care to elaborate?