Tech giants hold hundreds of billions in cash plus $1.6 trillion market capitalization.

Evidence

Individually and collectively, the knowledge, power, and wealth that surveillance capitalists command would be the envy of any ancient potentate, just as they are now coveted by the modern state. With 2017 balance sheets reporting 126 billion in cash and securities for Microsoft, 92 billion for Google, and about 30 billion for Facebook, and the financial markets endorsing their ever-expanding instrumentarian regimes with more than 1.6 trillion in market capitalization in mid-2017, these are the rare utopianists who can oversee the translation of their imaginations into fact without soldiers to pave the way in blood. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1289

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete balance-sheet data links to the broader argument about surveillance-capitalist economic power being unrivaled. — connects to: Tech firms dominate markets by capitalization despite modest revenue shares — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 205