The Future Of Conglomerates Is Conglomerates

Are Conglomerates Making a Comeback or Have They Completely Lost All Relevance? They’ve Never Really Gone Away, at Least in India. Here’s Why They Are Unlikely to Vanish in Future Either. 
 

- Aveek Datta

A FEW WEEKS AGO, the world was united in watching the nail-biting efforts of a small group of cave divers, spelunkers, and the Thai Navy, to rescue a group of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand. Divers from Britain coordinated the rescue with the Thai team. Meanwhile, in far-away Los Angeles, tech wunderkind Elon Musk had put his research team to work on a small submarine that could help save those boys. That the successful rescue happened without the submarine is a different story, as is the flak Musk took for his efforts. What’s fascinating is Musk’s seemingly seamless transition from outer space to underwater research.

Actually, it’s not such a leap. Musk is not just the man behind SpaceX and Tesla. He also founded The Boring Company in 2016, to create a network of transport tunnels to solve Los Angeles’ growing traffic problem. Then, last year, Musk set up Neuralink, a brain-computer interface company. He is also the principal investor in a motley group of companies, ranging from solar panels to online payments to brain research. For all that he belongs very much to the present (and to the future, his fan club insists), Musk seems to be carrying on the legacy of the great American conglomerates of the 1960s such as ITT. And he’s not alone. Companies like Alphabet (that’s Google to those who haven’t kept up) and Amazon are being fashioned, consciously or otherwise, as the great conglomerates of our time.