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I did a run at the (amateur) math off Google Finance and Crunchbase. With some companies I couldn't find's numbers outright omitted, and using old valuations, I

I did a run at the (amateur) math off Google Finance and Crunchbase. With some companies I couldn't find's numbers outright omitted, and using old valuations, I totaled those corps filing as valued at $2.58 trillion in market cap., at least $131 billion of valuation and another $8 billion in investments in un-valuated companies. Assuming those investments hold value at least equal to the total worth of those companies in sum, we can reasonably assume the companies party to this brief represent value of at least 16% of US GDP. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y0VtAf9OpjwU7Haf4dHYCdw4Wj4UmJedVY3MgkDSBGE https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y0VtAf9OpjwU7Haf4dHY... in case anyone else was wondering EDIT: indeed it is > 15% even including only the publicly traded companies, for which the numbers of can be considered less speculative

akiselev 10y ago
GDP is the total value of goods flowing through the economy (more or less), not the total value of all property so it's not a very meaningful comparison. By this measure, Vanguard's $1.7 trillion assets under management account for over 10% of US GDP but obviously that's incorrect, that money is just parked across a bunch of assets. The US manufacturing industry is about $3 trillion a year in actual industrial production and the tech industry has way less leverage, let alone political clout. Edit: the total market cap of the S&P 500 broke $15 trillion in 2013 and as of 2015, all of the companies in that index didn't even employ a fifth of US workers. Add in all the spending and investment property that doesn't make it into S&P figures (govt taxes + bonds, real estate, etc) and I bet the total number is probably >$100 trillion.
lpolovets 10y ago
It's hard to compare market caps to GDP because GDP is kind of like "aggregate value of everything produced this year" while a market cap is "estimated total profits for a company from now until the end of time." So you might have a company like Walmart with $200b in market cap but ~$500b in annual revenue (3% of GDP by itself!) and $15b in net income. On the other hand there are companies like Adobe with $60b market caps and $6b in annual revenue and $1b in net income. So the GDP vs market cap comparison is somewhat apples to oranges, although there's no disputing the companies in the brief have a large impact on the US economy.
- donaldguy 10y ago
  Fair points, both you and akiselev; thanks for the clarification I am not an especially economically-(or even really quantitatively) inclined person; I just see GDP bandied about as a metric of "size of economy" and market cap as "value of company". Revenue is probably locatable if someone wants to dig into quarterlies... I probably spent too much time on this exercise already
  - akiselev 10y ago
    It's actually pretty easy but for a first order estimate: http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+2015+revenue+of+Google+%2B+Apple+%2B+Autodesk+%2B+eBay+%2B+Facebook+%2B+Intel+%2B+LinkedIn+%2B+Marin+software&x=0&y=0 http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+2015+revenue+of+Googl... I'm on mobile so I can't get the interface to work properly but it's much easier on desktop Mathematica or WolframAlpha. In the above figure, I only included names from the OP that I was certain were public after a quick glance and I didn't even get to Microsoft. The number is something like $500 billion a year but as a sibling comment to yours mentions, this includes international revenue that may never make it to the US. Accurate data on this scale is hard to come by without a working Bloomberg terminal.
  - lpolovets 10y ago
    Here's a very, very rough ballpark estimate based on your data: - $2.7T in market cap - let's say average P/E ratio is 25 (P/E is approximately the ratio of company valuation to annual profits) - let's say the profit margin of a typical tech company is 20% - let's say 40% of a typical tech company's revenue is in the US Estimated US revenue of the companies in your spreadsheet: $2.7T / 25 / 0.20 * 0.40 = $216b (about 1.5% of GDP, which is still huge) By the way, I think your initial estimate of the total market cap of companies signing the brief is quite useful and informative, it just shouldn't be compared to GDP :)
- johnloeber 10y ago
  To be clear: it's not just hard, it is explicitly wrong. A more correct measure is a much simpler one: the aggregate product of all these companies over the GDP. Note that this aggregate product is of course a component of the GDP, so you can express this neatly as a percentage. I see only one major accounting complication in constructing this metric, and that's the inclusion/exclusion of foreign products and subsidiaries. (See e.g. offshore revenues that are not repatriated, and therefore not part of the domestic product calculations -- I think?)
return0 10y ago
But that argument won't fly well: "Bunch of rich guys want to go against the will of the people"
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Didn't Trump actually lose the popular vote? The USA isn't a democracy, it's a republic.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    When the union formed concessions were made... An Ohian's vote weighs, say 1.4, a californian 0.6. So depending on where you vote, your vote weighs more or less. I read Trump lost the popular vote by 3M. But then so did Bush. I'm not American, my opinion is about as much worth as my passport.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      When the union was formed, the big concession was the "three-fifths compromise": slaves counted for the purposes of vote apportioning, but weren't actually allowed to vote. Preservation of the racist institution of slavery was a driving force behind the unequal apportionment. And California wasn't a state but a largely empty colony of Spain.
  - return0 10y ago
    still, those 97 companies do not represent a majority
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    The "popular vote" is not the will of the people: a) the rules of voting are clear, this is both the will of the people, and is also what the people are expected to accept as citizens. The time to denounce or change those rules is before your guy loses. b) the popular vote is not the entire country, because not everyone voted. Not only do campaign strategies and other factors affect those numbers (to a degree that might make up the difference), but if you argue that people who didn't vote simply lost out, or don't count in deriving "the will of the people", then you could just as well argue that so did those who lost to the electoral college system.

akiselev 10y ago

GDP is the total value of goods flowing through the economy (more or less), not the total value of all property so it's not a very meaningful comparison. By this measure, Vanguard's $1.7 trillion assets under management account for over 10% of US GDP but obviously that's incorrect, that money is just parked across a bunch of assets. The US manufacturing industry is about $3 trillion a year in actual industrial production and the tech industry has way less leverage, let alone political clout. Edit: the total market cap of the S&P 500 broke $15 trillion in 2013 and as of 2015, all of the companies in that index didn't even employ a fifth of US workers. Add in all the spending and investment property that doesn't make it into S&P figures (govt taxes + bonds, real estate, etc) and I bet the total number is probably >$100 trillion.

lpolovets 10y ago

It's hard to compare market caps to GDP because GDP is kind of like "aggregate value of everything produced this year" while a market cap is "estimated total profits for a company from now until the end of time." So you might have a company like Walmart with $200b in market cap but ~$500b in annual revenue (3% of GDP by itself!) and $15b in net income. On the other hand there are companies like Adobe with $60b market caps and $6b in annual revenue and $1b in net income. So the GDP vs market cap comparison is somewhat apples to oranges, although there's no disputing the companies in the brief have a large impact on the US economy.

donaldguy 10y ago
Fair points, both you and akiselev; thanks for the clarification I am not an especially economically-(or even really quantitatively) inclined person; I just see GDP bandied about as a metric of "size of economy" and market cap as "value of company". Revenue is probably locatable if someone wants to dig into quarterlies... I probably spent too much time on this exercise already
- akiselev 10y ago
  It's actually pretty easy but for a first order estimate: http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+2015+revenue+of+Google+%2B+Apple+%2B+Autodesk+%2B+eBay+%2B+Facebook+%2B+Intel+%2B+LinkedIn+%2B+Marin+software&x=0&y=0 http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+2015+revenue+of+Googl... I'm on mobile so I can't get the interface to work properly but it's much easier on desktop Mathematica or WolframAlpha. In the above figure, I only included names from the OP that I was certain were public after a quick glance and I didn't even get to Microsoft. The number is something like $500 billion a year but as a sibling comment to yours mentions, this includes international revenue that may never make it to the US. Accurate data on this scale is hard to come by without a working Bloomberg terminal.
- lpolovets 10y ago
  Here's a very, very rough ballpark estimate based on your data: - $2.7T in market cap - let's say average P/E ratio is 25 (P/E is approximately the ratio of company valuation to annual profits) - let's say the profit margin of a typical tech company is 20% - let's say 40% of a typical tech company's revenue is in the US Estimated US revenue of the companies in your spreadsheet: $2.7T / 25 / 0.20 * 0.40 = $216b (about 1.5% of GDP, which is still huge) By the way, I think your initial estimate of the total market cap of companies signing the brief is quite useful and informative, it just shouldn't be compared to GDP :)
johnloeber 10y ago
To be clear: it's not just hard, it is explicitly wrong. A more correct measure is a much simpler one: the aggregate product of all these companies over the GDP. Note that this aggregate product is of course a component of the GDP, so you can express this neatly as a percentage. I see only one major accounting complication in constructing this metric, and that's the inclusion/exclusion of foreign products and subsidiaries. (See e.g. offshore revenues that are not repatriated, and therefore not part of the domestic product calculations -- I think?)

return0 10y ago

But that argument won't fly well: "Bunch of rich guys want to go against the will of the people"

Ensorceled 10y ago
Didn't Trump actually lose the popular vote? The USA isn't a democracy, it's a republic.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  When the union formed concessions were made... An Ohian's vote weighs, say 1.4, a californian 0.6. So depending on where you vote, your vote weighs more or less. I read Trump lost the popular vote by 3M. But then so did Bush. I'm not American, my opinion is about as much worth as my passport.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    When the union was formed, the big concession was the "three-fifths compromise": slaves counted for the purposes of vote apportioning, but weren't actually allowed to vote. Preservation of the racist institution of slavery was a driving force behind the unequal apportionment. And California wasn't a state but a largely empty colony of Spain.
- return0 10y ago
  still, those 97 companies do not represent a majority
- Chris2048 10y ago
  The "popular vote" is not the will of the people: a) the rules of voting are clear, this is both the will of the people, and is also what the people are expected to accept as citizens. The time to denounce or change those rules is before your guy loses. b) the popular vote is not the entire country, because not everyone voted. Not only do campaign strategies and other factors affect those numbers (to a degree that might make up the difference), but if you argue that people who didn't vote simply lost out, or don't count in deriving "the will of the people", then you could just as well argue that so did those who lost to the electoral college system.