[luckylion]

Yeah, but it compares companies from a state/economic zone of 300m or 450m people to a state of 4m people.

Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.

If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.

I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.

[fleetwoodsnack]

It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).

Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.

[iForgotMyPW]

I was just reading something on Medium about this wrt Apple