Big Tech's Massive Dollar-per-Second Paycheck

$290 billion dollars in net income from $1.6 trillion in revenue: these are the results of the "GAMAM five" over the past year (twelve months ended September 30, 2023). After a dip in profits and sales especially in the latter half of 2022, the biggest U.S. tech companies have successfully bounced back, in part due to heavy restructuring causing tens of thousands of job losses. Still, they couldn't replicate the profitability explosion caused by the pandemic and many people turning to online services out of necessity, with net incomes decreasing year-over-year among increasing revenue.

To make these sums more relatable, we have broken down their profits to a shorter time scale: net income per second. Based on Apple's net profits from October 2022 to September 2023, the company earned $3,074 per second during this period. Next up are Microsoft and Alphabet, with $2,443 and $2,115 in profits generated every second, respectively, followed by Meta ($942) and Amazon ($636).

These figures look all the more extreme when compared with the median income of U.S. citizens. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the year 2022, the median household income stood at roughly $75,000, down 2.3 percent compared to 2021. This means that it takes Apple not even half a minute to make a year's worth of money available to the average U.S. household.