Who Heads Big Tech in America?
The Big Five (GAMAM)
L to R: Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
Big Tech (the term came into popular use between 2013-2017) is one term for the four or five giants that rule American tech. It consists of Google (now Alphabet), Amazon (which Fortune classifies under the Retail category), Facebook (now Meta), and Apple. These are often called GAFA or The Big Four, or The Four Horsemen. When Microsoft is included, the group is called The Big Five, or GAMAM. These GAMAM corporations were five of the six most valuable publicly traded corporations in the world in 2020.
These five tech behemoths also fared strikingly well during the pandemic. As Shira Ovide of The New York Times reported in October 2021, “In the last year, the five tech superpowers — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook — had combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion … The pandemic has made the tech giants and their bosses unfathomably rich. (Even more unfathomably rich than they were before.)”
All of The Big Five are headed by men. And, these CEOs have become household names, as their decisions affect all Americans.
Big Tech (0 of 5 = 0%)
What will it take for women to be 50% of the leaders of Big Tech in America?