Big Tech: Private Profits, Public Power

Source: Corriere della Sera – Mediobanca Research Area, “Big Tech, Profits Reach $790 Billion”, 12 December 2025

The extreme concentration of digital wealth

According to Mediobanca’s Research Area, in just three years the world’s 119 largest digital groups have accumulated $790 billion in profits. This figure alone would be enough to describe a structural transformation of the global economy. But the most significant fact lies elsewhere: the overwhelming share of these profits has been generated by just 25 Big Tech companies, each capable of producing tens of millions of dollars in profits every single day. These are no longer merely successful companies, but entities with an unprecedented capacity for accumulation.

Liquidity without social reinvestment

The crucial question is not how much they earn, but how they use this enormous mass of liquidity. Mediobanca highlights that around half of these profits—over $400 billion—is invested in short-term securities, often U.S. government bonds. Not innovation, not employment, not redistribution: financial parking. This behaviour signals a model that does not structurally reinvest in the economic and social fabric from which it extracts value, but instead seeks the safety of public debt.

When Big Tech becomes a creditor of states

The shift is subtle yet decisive: Big Tech companies are no longer merely taxpayers (often elusive ones), but are becoming direct financiers of sovereign debt. In this reversed relationship, the state no longer only governs the market—it also depends on it. As Mediobanca notes, the weight of Big Tech in public debt reveals an influence that is not merely economic, but potentially political.

Systemic power without democratic mandate

When a small number of companies concentrate profits, liquidity and the ability to influence global financial markets, the issue ceases to be industrial and becomes institutional. No Big Tech company has received a democratic mandate to play such a central role in the balance between finance, technology and politics. And yet, in practice, they do. Without transparency, without public accountability, and without adequate counterweights.

The paradox of innovation

The recurring argument is that these profits fuel innovation. But when innovation primarily generates liquidity immobilised in government bonds, the myth begins to crack. The digital economy promised widespread growth; instead, it has produced an extreme concentration of resources and decision-making power. Innovation, stripped of its social dimension, becomes mere accumulation.

Why Algopolio focuses on these numbers

Algopolio does not analyse these data out of moral indignation, but through a structural lens. These figures reveal a new balance of power, in which Big Tech companies are not only economic actors, but informal financial and political infrastructures. As long as this power is neither acknowledged, regulated nor rebalanced, the risk is that democracy remains formally sovereign but materially subordinated.

The problem is not that Big Tech companies earn a great deal.The problem is what they are able to do because of those earnings.