Justin Fox, Columnist

America's Most Winner-Take-All Industry, Visualized

If you thought the big banks were powerful, check out the (very few) leaders in tech.

August 24, 2017 at 2:53 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

1503586244_GettyImages-152462281 — Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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The 20 most valuable publicly traded information-technology and internet companies in the U.S. (which I have defined somewhat expansively to include Netflix Inc. and Tesla Inc., since they're based in Silicon Valley and all) were as of Wednesday's market close worth a collective $4.5 trillion.

The other 20 most valuable corporations in the country were collectively valued at a not-all-that-different $4.8 trillion.

The similarity ends there, though. The top 20 "non-tech" companies are distributed along a mostly smooth continuum from Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s $444 billion to Home Depot Inc.'s $176 billion.