“While the music industry continues to get buffeted by technological change – here comes the AI wave, next.” That’s how media visionary John Malone describes the relentlessly changing circumstances of the music business in his remarkable new book, Born To Be Wired.
Though Malone’s Liberty Media has prospered in the music space, including with an investment in SiriusXM that has turned out to be “one of the biggest returns on investment in the history of business,” Malone is repetitive about the dangers of believing you’re bulletproof. There’s always someone out there looking to replace you, and music instructs.
As Malone also recalled about the music industry outlook before Liberty’s investments in Sirius, Pandora, and others, “Just ten years earlier AOL was the hottest online service,” only for its dominance to quickly be eroded by an iPhone that the leading lights of communication viewed as nothing more than a niche product. In commerce, the future is much more than blurry.
It recalls a recent statistic published by the New York Times about the sizable investing of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle. The Times reports that on domestic data centers and manufacturing projects alone, the tech giants combined for $1.4 trillion in spending last year.
Consider the entities mentioned. Excepting Oracle, all have endured domestic and international antitrust scrutiny in recent years. And in Oracle’s case, it’s suffered “monopoly” oversight in the past. Importantly, and quite obviously, the spending ascribed to the businesses mentioned tell a tale at odds with the beliefs of the antitrust police.
It’s a simple reminder that the only businesses that don’t know they’re “monopolies” are the ones that routinely suffer charges of just that from various governmental entities. If the previous assertion weren’t true, it’s a safe bet that they wouldn’t be putting so much capital to work. They wouldn’t because monopolies don’t need to compete, and they couldn’t because their shareholders wouldn’t allow them to expend such enormous sums to add to an already impregnable moat.
There’s no such thing as monopoly in the technology sector, or for that matter any sector defined by intense dynamism. Precisely because the potential for outsize investment returns for disrupters in dynamic sectors is so enormous, stasis is tantamount to obsolescence.
To reference but two of the corporations mentioned above, a little over three years ago few outside of the technology orbit had ever heard of either OpenAI or Nvidia. Fast forward to January 2026, and the former is privately valued at $750 billion while Nvidia can presently lay claim to being the most valuable American business at $4.5 trillion.
It’s very nearly trite and cliched to point out through OpenAI and Nvidia that snoozing is losing. Thinking about this in recent years, the surest visible sign that Google knows it won’t be Google without relentlessly discovering an always opaque future can be found in how profoundly different a Google search was on November 1, 2022 versus December of 2022 and January of 2026. The change is rapid because even with the best and brightest of American tech companies, their brightness is the sign that they’re in a daily fight for relevance, and by extension, survival.
Malone explains why. See his plainly unnerved comment about constant music industry upheaval: “here comes the AI wave, next.” To say that AI will only have an impact on search is wholly naïve, which explains the frenzied investment of Amazon, Apple and Oracle…
OpenAI, among other things, is already taking aim at Apple’s iPhone dominance. The future will look nothing like the present. “Monopoly” is a myth.
