Top tech company executives are shrugging off the growing calls to split apart their companies gaining traction in capitals around the world.The idea that Silicon Valley’s biggest companies should be broken apart has gotten momentum in recent months in both parties in Washington, as both Trump administration regulators and Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren express interest in curbing the dominance of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. But leaders from several major American tech companies insist that trust-busting worries are far from their minds — in what could be taken as faith in their business models, forced bravado, or the kind of hubris that has angered regulators and activists alike.
“We don’t spend a lot of time talking about it,” Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said about the possibility that federal regulators could spin off his unit from its parent company, Amazon.
Jassy, speaking at an industry gathering called the Code Conference roughly 2,000 miles from Washington, said CEO Jeff Bezos and others in Amazon’s inner circle aren’t preoccupied by a potential forced restructuring at government hands. Far more front of mind, he said, are Google and Microsoft gaining ground into the cloud computing business AWS has long dominated. (Amazon and Microsoft are vying for a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon that has inspired considerable political maneuvering in Washington.)
Likewise, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said she hasn’t stopped to consider talk that her company should be severed from Google, though she added that should such a move happen, “We would figure it out.”
Get the Exclusive
11.29.2024