The robber barons are back. Here’s what we should do about it.

January 3, 2026, Opinion: If you can count to seven, you can number the men who control the largest single slice of Wall Street’s market value — in other words, the biggest players in the US 

Together, Tim Cook at Apple, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (Google), Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Jensen Huang at Nvidia, and Elon Musk at Tesla make up today’s tech barons.

The value of these seven companies equals more than one third of the S&P 500. Like their 19th-century counterparts who dominated the economy — Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Carnegie, Gould, Cooke, Astor — today’s tech titans provide us with innovations that make life both unimaginably better and unthinkably worse.

The nation has returned to the era of the robber barons (so-named for exploiting the system for personal gain), in which political influence is in the hands of the very wealthy, and the wealth gap is expanding. The new group’s reach would make even the richest of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt crowd blush.

What actions should Americans take today? To follow the lead of those who successfully put a check on some of the worst excesses of the first Gilded Age, we can continue to call for antitrust cases to stop monopolies, like the successful case against Google this year. And we can regulate social media to decrease misinformation, with policies like those Europe has focused on for years.