[gitgud]

Well I'm not any authority on the matter, but I'll say my piece.

Trillion dollar companies like Alphabet are very different from a traditional mid-sized company, in that they have evolved into giant distributed failure-tolerant entities. Every part of the business is designed with risk in mind.

Any product that has no direct or indirect ability to make profit is extinguished before consuming more of the company's resources (see [1] KilledByGoogle).

Youtube and Gmail have huge indirect revenue streams, and are not likely to be going any time soon. Youtube has advertisement and addictive content. Gmail has [2] advertising and it keeps people close to the Google search-engine which has more advertising.

I think a better question is what is an event which could decimate one of the FAANG?... I can't think of any that also leave the rest of the world intact...

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

[2] https://securityboulevard.com/2019/11/does-google-read-your-....

[jfoster]

I think the most likely event that could decimate one of the FAANG would be increased competition from another. For example, what happens to Amazon if Google decides to get deadly serious about e-commerce? What happens to Google if Apple & Microsoft decide to make Bing a joint venture? What happens to Facebook if Apple launch a social network?