Top 10 internet stocks – more than 1 trillion valuation

In a very short period of time, opinions of anything can change. It wasn’t so long ago that these statements were made about the internet as a commercial platform:

  • It’s for nerds. “Fine, you nerds can do what you want but normal people are never going to use this thing.”
  • It’s completely decentralized, which means you can’t trust it. No business is ever going to do anything on it because businesses won’t work on an untrusted environment. There won’t ever be any e-commerce.
  • There will never be any internet payments. No one will put their credit card on the internet.
  • It’s an open-source kind of thing so there will be no Internet companies.
  • It’s got all these technical deficiencies. It’s slow. It’s unreliable. It doesn’t work right. When you do a search, sometimes you get an answer back and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes when you dial in you get a busy signal.
  • What happen if your ISP goes out of business? Then you can’t get back online.
  • Once you get on the internet, even assuming you get on the internet, there’s nothing to do. There’s no content. Time magazine isn’t online, the New York Times isn’t online. It’s just a bunch of nerd stuff.

These classic soundbites come from Marc Andreessen in a recent interview while referencing those who think bitcoin will never be more than some kind of digital space oddity. While we are on the topic of economic change, it is telling to have a look at the market valuations of the top 10 internet companies. That is, companies less than 20 years old who could not have existed pre dot com. The US top 10 public companies now have an accumulated value of $1.168 trillion dollars.

  1. Google – $585 billion
  2. Facebook – $170 billion
  3. Amazon – $155 billion
  4. Ebay – $65 billion
  5. Priceline – $65 billion
  6. Yahoo – $36 billion
  7. Salesforce.com – $36 billion
  8. Twitter – $24 billion
  9. Linkedin – $21 billion
  10. Expedia – $11 billion

We can also add the upcoming float of Alibaba.com to this at anything between a further $120 to $200 billion.

This takes my mind directly to the potential of 3D printing, web of things and the solar energy industry. All of which are in their 1993 era. The only question remaining for entrepreneurs reading is this; What are you going to do about it?