If one looks a century back: AT&T, Xerox, IBM ... those were opportunities we can romanticize in hindsight looking back at the glowing examples of Bell Labs, PA

If one looks a century back: AT&T, Xerox, IBM ... those were opportunities we can romanticize in hindsight looking back at the glowing examples of Bell Labs, PARC etc. Today's Big Tech is unrivaled in its unique position to fund R&D. To put it on the talent's shoulder to decide against it ...? One can hope for individual cases but it is futile as Big Tech has fundamentally tilted the playing field not only on things like information flow but also on talent pool in their favor. From a system's POV at some point this of course gets stuck. For example Musk tries to outpace this with his "rate of innovation" concept which on surface seems like a refreshing idea but is running on an outdated and collapsing hardware ("actual existing globalization") resulting in absurd numbers on the BBI like $243B. Leaving aside the forgone "sign-changing" and hefty "printing" by the central processors, initiated manually by a curious circle of people with access who decided it was a good idea.