GM employed more people in 1929 than Google or Facebook do at their peaks.

Evidence

From the time they went public to 2016, Google and Facebook steadily climbed to the heights of market capitalization, with Google reaching 532 billion by the end of 2016 and Facebook reaching 332 billion, without Google ever employing more than 75,000 people or Facebook more than 18,000. General Motors took four decades to reach its highest market capitalization of $225.15 billion in 1965, when it employed 735,000 women and men. Most startling is that GM employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalization. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1589

Categorization

• CANDY: The Great Depression employment comparator is a striking, tweetable juxtaposition about how little labor hyperscale firms absorb.
• SEED: Could seed an essay contrasting the wealth-creation-per-worker profiles of industrial versus platform capitalism.
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the grafting/infrastructure article’s thread on how economic infrastructure has detached from human labor.