Few would argue that the four most successful companies of modern times – at least from an American perspective – are Amazon.com (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB), and Alphabet (GOOG) – better known as Google.

All four have market capitalizations of above $500 billion dollars, making them 4 of the top 5 largest publicly traded corporations in the world (Microsoft (MSFT) is the other one). All four continue to post impressive revenue growth, defying the laws of large numbers. All four are a big part of billions of users’ daily lives in a way that few companies in history have ever been. All four have immense competitive advantages that make competing with them directly in their target markets business suicide. And they represent 4 of the top 10 global brands.

They are some of the greatest business stories of all time.

But how did they get here? What makes them so special? Why do we come back, again and again, to give them ever larger amounts of our time and money?

And what are the risks of their continued market dominance?

These are the questions that business professor Scott Galloway sat out to answer in his recent book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

MagicDiligence recently had a chance to read the book and wanted to share some thoughts on Galloway’s insights, how it might be able to help us in investing and, maybe, in life.

The Companies

At the heart of the book is an analysis of how each company got to their dominant position, the pros and cons of their dominance, and the risks and consequences to society of it.

All 4 of the profiles are quite interesting and thought-provoking, with a bit different perspective than you may have considered before. The author believes that each of these firms could eventually be the first to a $1 trillion market valuation. One notable takeaway from these are Galloway’s evaluation of these firms’ basic appeal to the basic natural behaviors and need of human beings: