Verizon/AT&T/Comcast/Time Warner
This book assumes you are online. And who almost certainly owns the
line you are on? One of these four companies. Cable and telco lines
were one of the great legal monopolies of the twentieth century, and
the big four companies to have emerged from decades of mergers are
essential players in the digital age.
They face some major obstacles to taking advantage of their
position, however. In particular, most people hate them, and they have
no clear path to global status, as local telcos are a source of national
identity and governments are pesky about other nations listening in on
their phone calls and data. That said, everyone hated the railroads too,
and canal boat companies, and stage coach firms. As Ernestine the
phone operator, played by Lily Tomlin, used to say, “We don’t care. We
don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”
If you own the pipes on which the world’s data travels, you are
always going to be important, highly profitable, and very big. That
doesn’t fulfill many of our criteria for being a horseman, but it may be
enough to get you close. After that, all it would take would be an
outbreak of enlightened management and to be viewed as an
accelerant—unlikely, but still possible.
• • • •
Could any of these companies become the Fifth Horseman? And would
the Four Horsemen allow it to happen? Surely Amazon is never going
to let Walmart take back all of the ground the younger company has
captured. And Google, as it pursues autonomous vehicles, is surely
aware of Uber and Tesla.
But there is no accounting for the twists and turns of history. In
1970 IBM seemed unstoppable. In 1990 Microsoft made the
electronics industry quake in terror. Companies grow older, success
breeds complacency, and the departure of top talent in search of new
challenges and pre-IPO options on equity is inevitable. And, of course,
there is the wild card: right now, in some lab or dorm room, someone
is working on a new technology that will turn the digital world upside