Washington Post: Big Tech is worth even more the day after congressional grilling

July 30, 2020 Media

The four chief executives of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google just faced a five-hour deluge of probing and pointed questions from a Congress accusing the companies of various anticompetitive behaviors.

A day later, all four companies were worth even more.

The tech giants’ stock prices rose on Thursday as they reported strong financial results after the market closed. It shows, again, just how bulletproof the companies have become as investors bet on their long-term success, even amid a global pandemic, an economic decline and antitrust probes.

Wednesday’s hearing was already unlikely to shake investors, analysts said, especially because many questions veered off topic.

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All four companies’ stock prices climbed in after-hours trading — spiking more than 5 percent for Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Three of the companies, Amazon, Apple and Alphabet, are already among the most valuable in the world, with market caps of more than $1 trillion.

“Putting in rules and breaking up companies isn’t necessarily bad for stock prices,” said Matthew Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington think tank devoted to reducing the power of monopolies.

He pointed to the breakups of Standard Oil, AT&T and electric utilities, all of which he said were good for investors. “Does anybody really believe that if you separated AWS (Amazon’s cloud computing division) from the rest of Amazon that it would somehow reduce the value of the aggregate entity? Or course not,” he said.

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