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Like their 19th-century counterparts, today’s tech titans provide us with innovations that make life both unimaginably better and unthinkably worse.
Jane Hoffman is a former New York City Consumer Affairs commissioner, author of “Your Data, Their Billions,” and a fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School.
If you can count to seven, you can number the men who control the largest single slice of Wall Street’s market value — in other words, the biggest players in the US economy.
Together, Tim Cook at Apple, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (Google), Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Jensen Huang at Nvidia, and Elon Musk at Tesla make up today’s tech barons.
The value of these seven companies equals more than one third of the S&P 500. Like their 19th-century counterparts who dominated the economy — Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Carnegie, Gould, Cooke, Astor — today’s tech titans provide us with innovations that make life both unimaginably better and unthinkably worse.
The nation has returned to the era of the robber barons (so-named for exploiting the system for personal gain), in which political influence is in the hands of the very wealthy, and the wealth gap is expanding. The new group’s reach would make even the richest of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt crowd blush.
What actions should Americans take today? To follow the lead of those who successfully put a check on some of the worst excesses of the first Gilded Age, we can continue to call for antitrust cases to stop monopolies, like the successful case against Google this year. And we can regulate social media to decrease misinformation, with policies like those Europe has focused on for years.
Big Tech’s impact on the global economy and our daily lives is comparable to the seismic shift in the 1800s when, hand in hand with wild-eyed investors and industrial innovators, the railroad magnates drove the Industrial Revolution and Western expansion. Railroads were so dominant that by 1885, as economic historian Mary O’Sullivan noted, the New York Stock Exchange “was largely an Exchange for railroad stocks.” By 1900, the rail barons’ companies comprised more than 60 percent of market value on Wall Street. They symbolized the unlimited expansion of American ingenuity, as tech companies do today.
The reigning industries then and now have improved our lives by bringing us together as never before. The railways revolutionized every type of connection, from cross-country family visits to the explosion of manufacturing, by bringing goods and industry together. Today’s tech innovations redefine connecting via instant communication, instant access to services, and instant answers.
The earth-shaking invention of coast-to-coast train travel revamped time in the form of creating America’s first time zones. Today, Big Tech’s most popular apps and platforms defy space and time by giving us access to every corner of the world. In the rail barons’ day, settlers and entrepreneurs migrated to the vast central and Western parts of the country to farm and launch startups, and the economy expanded alongside them. Railway companies connected themselves to the steel and coal industries in a fortune-making loop that kept the trains running and the raw-materials industries producing.
In our time, artificial intelligence is creating the same fortune-making feedback loop by serving as an indispensable new route to doing business and managing increasingly complex tasks, and no one can avoid incorporating it. As tech giants race for market dominance in artificial intelligence, AI is likely to transform industries, putting even larger swaths of our economy in the hands of these few tech titans.
Convenience, efficiency, life-enhancing innovation, more free time, more connections — all good things. But the rail barons of the 1800s and tech barons of today also share a record of harm to some fundamental elements of society and democracy.
Most obviously, there are the massive wealth gaps seen in both Gilded Ages. In the late 19th century, 10 percent of the richest households held about 75 percent of the country’s wealth. The current gap is nearly as wide, with the top 10 percent wealthiest households holding about 67 percent of the nation’s household wealth. The bottom half of the country by wealth holds very little wealth, at 2.5 percent.
With their dominance on Wall Street, the old railway tycoons and today’s Big Tech leaders have also used their fortunes to gain outsized influence on lawmakers. Rail barons financed the campaigns of politicians they needed in Washington, resulting in a near total domination of the sector. Likewise in 2024, Big Tech broke its own influence record by pouring $61.5 million into lobbying. This resulted in, for example, the blocking of the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act in the House of Representatives in 2024.
Big Tech lobbying now includes one lobbyist for every two congresspeople — and it hampers the passage of laws that would stop the free flow of misinformation, which polarizes the public, prevents citizens from making informed decisions in their lives, and erodes trust in our institutions. Such action tears at the fabric of democracy.
Like the old rail barons, Big Tech leaders also monopolize their industries, wiping out competition to set their own rules and prices.
We know what happened to the railroad robber barons, but we don’t know the future of Big Tech overreach. To address the railroad giants’ monopolies, unfair pricing, and safety hazards, late-19th-century lawmakers created the Interstate Commerce Commission, passed trust-busting laws, and introduced new public safety regulations.
We should consider the same fixes that worked more than 125 years ago, including breaking up Big Tech monopolies and passing the Kids Online Safety Act.
The existence of a second Gilded Age underscores that monumental advances come with overreach and outsized power in the hands of a few. Once again, we’re enduring serious risks and harms for too many. As we rush, AI-powered, into the future, we should embrace the idea that policies promoting economic fairness and human integrity promote our best future.
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