“My explanation is that the legacy economy is being sunset in favor of the Internet economy.”
“I think those graphs reflect the secular shift towards the Internet. Almost every action that was once done offline is moving online, and routed through tech companies.”
What’s going on here? Patterns that would once have been dismissed as coincidences now seem to signal something deeper.
From grocery orders to financial transactions, human interactions, and even remote work, the COVID-accelerated rush to digital has become the main route for commerce and connection.
Balaji’s response to Collison’s question made explicit what many now intuitively sense: tech companies aren’t just growing, they’re becoming the primary infrastructure for life itself.
“Legacy” sectors like real estate, banking, and manufacturing are being reoriented, rewired, or outright replaced by software. In Balaji’s words, almost every offline activity is “routed through tech companies,” as digital-first solutions offer scale, efficiency, and global reach previously unimaginable.
This is not an innovation cycle but a replatforming. It’s why companies that once had nothing in common now show the same growth curves or contraction risks: the offline world is contracting, while the internet economy swells to fill the gap.
For investors and founders, these trends reinforce a simple imperative: bet on digital, or risk obsolescence. The parallel growth patterns across disconnected verticals suggest that internet penetration is now the single biggest driver of economic fate.
Tech companies, with their network effects and digital rails, become the middlemen for everything. They reinforce the winner-take-most dynamic so apparent in today’s markets.
For policymakers, there’s a warning: the digital divide will only widen unless deliberate intervention closes it. As more actions from life are intermediated by platforms, the cost of being unconnected grows.
The trajectory of Magnificent 7 stocks, and, in particular, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, shines a light on a future where the majority of human action runs through software. It’s a world reshaped not by a single breakthrough, but by the universal, irreversible shift from meatspace to cyberspace.
The evidence is in the charts, and the trend is only getting steeper.
