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OPINION:
It’s a tribute to American tech dominance that the Magnificent Seven companies — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — have a combined net worth greater than that of all the companies in Europe.
Many Washington regulators view these digital age and made-in-America tech titans — which have created hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth for large and small American investors alike — as villains, not heroes. They keep inserting smothering regulations via antitrust laws in a mistaken belief that this will help small upstart tech firms compete and thrive.
This would make as much sense as the government calling on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to stop writing so many hit records because it isn’t fair to all the other bands.
The case against “Big Tech” brought by the lawyers and regulators is that these sharks in Silicon Valley are swallowing up the minnows.
That’s not just wrongheaded thinking; it’s exactly backward. The tech industry of 2025 in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors such as Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City’s “Silicon Slopes” is characterized by thousands of smaller and often more nimble “Little Tech” companies that are created and often flourish as partners, suppliers, potential merger targets or head-on competitors to Big Tech.
This healthy mix of established, scaled firms alongside smaller, nimbler competitors fosters the mad scramble for innovation and profitability.
It’s a race to the top, and there’s no assurance that the Magnificent Seven today will be the high flyers five or 10 years from now. It’s a good bet that we will be watching a new generation of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Look at how 39-year-old tech wiz Sam Altman of OpenAI has burst onto the scene. He once called Mr. Musk his hero; now, he’s a threat to the Tesla CEO.
Think about today’s Magnificent Seven and raise your hand if you had heard of Nvidia five years ago. OpenAI you probably never heard of just three years ago.
Big firms incubate the talent that starts small firms. Former employees of America’s tech leaders often go on to start hugely successful businesses. OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba worked at Meta. ZipRecruiter and YouTube were founded by former eBay employees. A former Tesla employee started the news and opinion platform Substack.
Former Googlers have created over 2,000 startups, including Inflection AI, Adept AI Labs, Cohere, Perplexity.AI, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Fourteen out of the world’s 50 most successful AI startups were founded by former Google employees. Larger firms are key in incubating tech talent and ideas, catalyzing startups and innovation that benefit consumers and the broader economy.
How many times have you heard the complaint that American companies are too short-term oriented and don’t look past the next quarterly report? Then how is it that Google invests more than $10 billion a year in research and development? Why is it that Meta has invested over $46 billion since 2021 into Reality Labs, focusing on building augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies?
Amazon’s Project Kuiper, initiated in 2019, aims to deploy 3,000 low earth orbit satellites to provide global broadband internet. So far, that has been a $16 billion investment in the future.
Many of the breakthrough achievements of the next decade are just as likely to come from venture-capital-funded startups that no one has heard of today. In Silicon Valley, these disruptive upstarts, such as OpenAI, are known as unicorns. As of 2024, the world had more than 1,400 unicorns, over half of which were founded in the United States.
Why is Little Tech squeezed into Silicon Valley and other American tech corridors such as Austin and Salt Lake City? Because they feed off the creativity and dynamism of a high-tech and risk-taking venture capital ecosystem that is nowhere else in the world to be found.
Federal regulators and the antitrust cops are the poisonous disruptors of this creative destruction process that has placed America so far into the global lead of innovation.
The ethos of Washington is: You can succeed and grow and become profitable, but not too much. If this anti-success attitude prevails, the casualties won’t be the Magnificent Seven but the next generation of trillion-dollar companies. Oh, they will come. But they won’t be made in America.
• Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and co-author of the book “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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