Big, public companies don’t get big or public without finance. There are literally rules against selling securities to the public without a financial handmaiden, or “underwriter”. More generally, they have to combine elements to fight and survive. And not just finance and tech, as broad as those are.
The same goes for public companies in finance, by the way. Goldman is way more than an investment bank, or even a “finance company”. Depending on how you see it, that’s the problem.
Tim Cook came up at IBM, as did his replacement as COO. Their GC came from Honeywell, and before that a Big Law firm, a Supreme Court clerkship, and the Justice Department appeals division. Their CFO came up in finance at GM. Most people think of the cars first, but dollars-wise, the auto-finance line of business long ago eclipsed the automaker.
Wonderful and terrible things happen when you bring people like this together. When half a dozen apex predators make a cross-functional executive team—not a given—and then you give them billions of dollars and thousands of employees, the earth shakes. There are aspects of what they do where the only really effective regulation is competition from other multinationals.
There are other aspects where I’m sure even Tim silently prays that the masses will keep moving his way.
As an aside, if you’re interested in the financialization of tech, Tim Hwang published an interesting little book, Subprime Attention Crisis, last year: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651
