Apple and Amazon built media empires through acquisition conquest funded by investor cash

Evidence

Not only is A24 an investment of Guggenheim Partners, thereby routing capital back into its investment fund, to be redeployed to things like Arctic extraction (or, vice versa, the spoils of Arctic extraction are invested in A24), but A24 has relationships with similarly fraught global empires, namely Apple and Amazon. If measured by valuation (i.e., the financial value of a company determined by stock price), Apple and Amazon are two of the largest companies in the history of the world, at 3 trillion and 1.5 trillion, respectively, as of December 2023. If their current market power remains unchallenged by regulatory enforcement, those numbers will likely continue to climb. The global disorder of Apple’s supply chain is legion, from the gold mines in Colombia run by violent organized crime ­syndicates, to the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that exploit child labor, to the installation of suicide-prevention nets at iPhone-producing Foxconn factories in China. Both Amazon and Apple have built their empires not through competitive success, but through conquest. Each uses its investor-fueled war chests of cash to purchase competitors: 122 in Apple’s case and 108 in Amazon’s. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 281

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘catalog acquisition’ thread: Apple (122 acquisitions) and Amazon (108) bought their way into Hollywood rather than competing, extending the ownership-structure-leaves-fingerprints thesis of the reader’s equipment.
• XREF: The claim that A24 routes Guggenheim investment into Arctic extraction parallels the extractive-logics-through-culture theme in One Square Inch of Silence and the reader’s broader interest in finance shaping cultural form.