Apple got to $1 trillion the right way

Everyone should cheer Apple's valuation. Even socialists.

Steve Jobs.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Apple is the first U.S. company to reach $1 trillion in market value — arguably the first company ever — and even left-wingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders should think that's pretty awesome. Yes, it's uber-fashionable to decry corporate power, especially that of America's technology giants whose products and services are such a big part of our everyday lives. And at least for now — here comes Amazon! — Apple is the biggest of big tech.

Some anti-tech activists will almost surely use the historic achievement as further evidence that the tech titans need to be shackled with regulation or broken up into more manageable pieces. For them, superbig is automatically superbad. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are, as critic and NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway has dramatically put it, "our new gods, our new source of love, our consumptive gods," and they must be confronted and controlled by their worshippers — us.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.