[...] In 2007, only one of what are now called the “Big Tech” firms made the list (Microsoft); today, the top seven slots are occupied by such firms, the first five nominally u.s. companies, the other two, Chinese. Apple entered the list in the last quarter of 2009, as the “recovery” began, its market cap less than $200 billion. Today, holding the top spot, it is worth five times that.23 The iPhone was first marketed in late 2007, as the crisis set in. By 2014 Apple was worth half a trillion dollars on paper; a year later, three-quarters of a trillion. Throughout this period, its core products remained a set of “smart” devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod), an expansive network of retail stores, and a lucrative service-provisioning division. Its recent triumphs in equities markets, like those of its peer “Big Tech” companies Facebook and Google, have come despite very little innovation in either product development or organizational efficiencies. Throughout the crisis period, unlike firms across the economy as a whole, Apple has piled up profits; by February 2018 the company held cash reserves of $300 billion.24 Yet instead of investing these profits in product innovation or expanding existing capacity, Apple has chosen to spend an astonishing $210 billion since 2012 on stock buybacks, a full $100 billion of it in 2018, as a windfall from the $1.5 trillion dollar tax cuts passed by Congress flooded into their coffers. Many other cash-rich corporations followed suit. According to the Roosevelt Institute, corporations spent $3 out of every $5 of their net profit on stock repurchases between 2015 and 2017; some $1.1 trillion in corporate profits (with Apple leading the way) was spent on buybacks by the end of 2018.25

In the first half of 2018, as stock market indexes (especially the tech-heavy NASDAQ) blew through historical highs, a total of six companies, all usually lumped in the category of the “tech”—or, more broadly, the “Internet”—sector, generated a full 99 percent of the S&P 500 index’s gains for the year.28 The simple subtraction of the FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet’s Google), along with Microsoft, from the index would leave a group of 494 large-cap companies that have generated net zero growth in equity prices over the first six months of 2018.