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

by Scott Galloway

At its core, Apple fills two instinctual needs: to feel closer to God and be more attractive to the opposite sex.

10Apple’s cash on hand is nearly the GDP of Denmark.

As measured by adoption and usage, Facebook is the most successful thing in the history of humankind. There are 7.5 billion people in the world, and 1.5 billion have a daily relationship with Facebook.

Google is a modern man’s god. It’s our source of knowledge—ever-present, aware of our deepest secrets, reassuring us where we are and where we need to go, answering questions from trivial to profound. No institution has the trust and credibility of Google: About one out of six queries posed to the search engine have never been asked before.

General Motors created economic value of approximately $231,000 per employee (market cap/workforce).21 This sounds impressive until you realize that Facebook has created an enterprise worth $20.5 million per employee … or almost a hundred times the value per employee of the organizational icon of the last century.

THIRTY PERCENT OF U.S. households have a gun, and 64 percent have Amazon Prime.1, 2 Wealthy households are more likely to have Amazon Prime than a landline phone.

Jeff Bezos drove cross-country from New York to Seattle with his wife and formulated his business plan for Amazon while on the road.

Observe how women and men shop and you’ll see that not much has changed. Women feel fabric, try on shoes with a dress, and ask to see things in different colors. Men see something that can sate their appetite, kill (buy) it, and get back to the cave as fast as possible.

Amazon, born in 1994, registered more revenue after twenty-two years in 2016 ($120 billion) than Walmart, founded in 1962, did after thirty-five years in 1997 ($112 billion).23