The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Over the next week, I was on Bloomberg TV twice to discuss the issue, and a strange thing happened. I started getting hate mail regarding my view that Apple should comply with the court order. A lot of hate mail. Wherever you stand in the debate regarding Apple and privacy, the more interesting question is: Would we have endured this hand-wringing if the shooter’s phone had been a BlackBerry? No? Why? Because the FBI-inspired court order to unlock the phone would have had a different reception at the door of the Waterloo, Canada, headquarters. My guess is that if the Canadian firm didn’t unlock the phone within forty-eight hours, several dozen congressmen and congresswomen would threaten a trade embargo. Pew surveyed the U.S. public on the issue and found it mostly split. However, there was a huge skew between cohorts. In sum, young Democrats were on Apple’s side, and old Republicans, government.3 That wasn’t what you might expect from either side, the former being for expanding the power of big government, and the latter for protecting the prerogatives of big business. But Apple, and the other horsemen, play by a different set of rules. Put another way, anybody who matters in the consumer world is for Apple. Young Democrats (millennials with college degrees) didn’t just inherit the Earth, they conquered it, led by engineering grads from MIT and Harvard dropouts. They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young people do, and have a facility with technolog...

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