If you pay attention to Washington politics often you will hear the government will talk about the power of big tech and maybe it should be broken up. Nothing much happens and then you will hear the words again. There is an element of truth to what Washington politicians are discussing.

In an article by David Streitfeld of the New York Times News Service, In April 2020, the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos said Amazon would not make a profit and spend the money on people rather than profits. Mr. Bezos was expecting to break even, the quarterly result came in July 2020, Amazon had a record operating profit of $5.8 billion. The months since have established new records. Amazon’s margins, which measure the profit on every dollar of sales are the highest in the history of Amazon.

The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by 70% to more than $10 trillion or the entire size of the US stock market in 2002. Apple has enough cash in the bank to give every American $600.

PayPal, the digital payments company, had 325 million active accounts before the pandemic, now it has 392 million active accounts.

In March 2020, Glenn Kelman CEO of online real estate broker Redfin received a call from Henry Ellenbogen who started his own fund. He asked Mr. Kelman when people start touring homes via an iPhone that this was a good way to see a home, If that happens how will you compete with other brokerage companies? If you have looked at buying homes, video has been adapted to something people are willing to use.

Zoom is both a verb and a stock market winner for virtual lives.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, during the pandemic if you had not invested in tech, your portfolio would have suffered, however all companies are using tech to meet the demands of their customers and use technology. Whether we will all continue to do or we want something else is a matter of debate, however as long as the technology is relative easy to use and you feel safe in using it, the world has changed and even large companies have adapted, and usually large companies adapting takes more time. Sometimes change can be good for large companies.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.