A fresh discussion around the growing power of global technology firms has emerged after comments made by a prominent Indian tech entrepreneur drew strong reactions across social media platforms. The remarks highlighted how the scale and financial strength of modern tech companies are beginning to resemble that of powerful institutions from history.
Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, recently compared today’s large technology companies to the East India Company in a post on X (formerly Twitter). He wrote: “Big tech is bigger than most sovereign nations. “East India Company” is the way to think about them”.
Although he did not name any specific company, Vembu was responding to a post discussing fundraising by Google. The post noted that Google raised $32 billion in debt in 1 day, an amount comparable to what a country like India raises in about 100 days. It also highlighted that Google issued a $1 billion 100-year bond, longer than India’s longest 40-year government bond.
The post stated: “Google raised $32B of debt in 1 day, what a sovereign government like India raises in 100 days. Google also issued a 100-year bond worth $1B, which is longer than India’s longest at 40 years. Big tech now operates like sovereign nations with fundraising size and time horizons.” The bond sale, issued in British pounds, marked the first century bond attempt by a technology company since IBM did so in 1996.
Vembu’s comments quickly triggered debate online. One user replied, “They are the new EIC, but operating on a different plane of existence.
The ‘Money’ layer of control is collapsing, so the elites are shifting to the ‘Data’ layer. We are moving from a world defined by the Credit Score to one defined by the Algorithm. The EIC wanted spices. Big Tech wants souls (or at least, the predictive data that mimics it)”.
Another user wrote, “goes deeper than scale tho. east india company controlled trade routes, big tech controls data routes. running business infra across 3 countries and every cloud pricing change or api deprecation sends you scrambling. the dependency is invisible until the terms change”.
A third comment added, “You are wrong Sridhar. Big Tech operates on long-term horizons, while we often trip over ROI. Look at i-flex Solutions: it built world-class products like Microbanker and Flexcube that dominated global banking. India ruled that space, but eventually, Oracle took over because they had the vision to scale.”
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