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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet + Facebook revenue now represents 1/2% of world GDP and still growing rapidly.

Edit: possibly not quite but almost certainly 1/2% excluding China.

Considering the world would be more than 0.5% worse without Google, I guess they're still undervalued?

You're making the assumption that no company, or companies, would step in and provide a similar service for a similar or better value.

Don't see how your claim follows. If another company would have stepped in to provide a similar or better service instead of Google, then it would have been that company worth 0.5% of world GDP.

Bing search, edge browser and windows phones? Amazon owning youtube? Companies would step up, but not sure if that would be a better scenario than what we have now.

This isn't even close to being true.

World GDP is $80T. Google's run-rate is $240B revenue and Facebook's is $116B. That's $356B / $80T => 0.445%. Close enough for internet math.

It's not quite half a percent by most accounts of GWP, but it's around there.

0.5% of global GDP would be more reasonable, although a fraction is an odd way of writing it.

It also doesn't tell us much other than Google and Facebook are large companies with significant earnings. You can probably provide a similar percentage for VW/Toyota, Boeing/Airbus, Walmart/Amazon, or any other pair of large companies that are the leaders in their respective markets. Indeed, if you lumped the entire Fortune 500 together, they're probably make up a sizable portion (if not the majority) of world GDP.

1/2 = 0.5 last time I checked but if you find 0.5 more reasonable that's fine.

Seriously though, Wal-Mart has $500 billion revenues but it's not growing at the rate of these companies. By lots of metrics these companies are increasingly globally significant in a way that most of the examples you quote aren't.

Walmart on its own has more revenue than Google and Facebook combined.

Yup, WMT most recently reported $566B in revenue.

Judging from all the comments below I guess I am the only one confused.

Because I interpreted it 1 or 2% of world GDP.

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