For Google-Alphabet, $125 billion; for Apple, $112 billion; for Microsoft, $105 billion; for Nvidia, $100 billion; for Amazon, $76 billion; for Meta, $58 billion; and for Tesla, a mere $5 billion. The total: $580 billion (€499 billion) – not revenue, not operating margin, but net profit after tax over the past 12 months. The Magnificent Seven, these American tech giants, are billionaires and seemingly invincible. For comparison, LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate, posted annual profits of around $13 billion, and French tech darling Mistral AI celebrated raising €1.7 billion last fall.

The tech sector is not alone. Corporate America is crushing the planet with its profits. Profits rose from $2.5 trillion in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, to $4 trillion in 2024 before taxes, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Missouri. As a percentage of national income, the profit rate increased from 13.6% to 16.2% between the end of 2019 and the end of 2024. That figure is all the more impressive given that overseas profits declined (from 2.8% to 2.1%) and financial sector profits stagnated (2.9%).

Industrial and commercial companies generated these profits within the United States, while the share of wages in the gross domestic product stagnated at 61.6%. “The recent increase in corporate profits was entirely driven by the real economy,” wrote Ricardo Marto, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. This trend is explained by lower interest rates, the drop in the corporate tax rate (from 35% to 21%) in 2017 during Donald Trump’s first term and, above all, the lack of competition in a country where oligopoly reigns supreme.

Gone are the days when European students went to New York to buy cheap clothes and computers, and traveled across the US on affordable flights, staying in inexpensive motels. As New York University economist Thomas Philippon demonstrated as early as 2019 in his book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, Americans abandoned free competition. The embodiment of that shift is billionaire Warren Buffett, a faux sage and true rentier, who invests only in companies that dominate their markets and can impose eye-watering margins, whether it be American Express, Coca-Cola, rail freight or Apple.

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