> But at the moment at least, there is definitely something they share in common that distinguishes them. What retailer starts AWS? What car maker is run by som

> But at the moment at least, there is definitely something they share in common that distinguishes them. What retailer starts AWS? What car maker is run by someone who also has a rocket company? If you went back a century and tried to figure out who would be running both a car company and a rocket company, the answer would almost certainly be the guy running Standard Oil. And abstracting "AWS" a bit, if you went back a century and looked for a company that was both a giant logistics business as well as a giant provider of stuff you need to run a business, you'd find Andrew Carnegie, who owned the trains that ran on railroads as well as the factories that built the steel for the railroads. Amazon and Tesla and SpaceX are "tech" companies in the sense that they make effective use of new technologies just as US Steel and Standard Oil did. But history does not remember those as tech companies; history remembers them as industrial consolidations, as vertically-integrated conglomerates, as trusts. I think you need a little more data than 1982 to make this comparison meaningful. I suspect there was a time during the last century in which trusts were much harder to build, when there was effective competition, and where the economy was working well for everyone, and during that time, the people with unnatural amounts of wealth only had it because it was previously accumulated and made available to them as an inheritance. I suspect we are now back to the economic/political conditions that made trusts and robber barons possible.