system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are we destined to see a handful of ultra-corporations one day own everything?

When I was a child, there were millionaires and corporations who cornered the market on certain things. Now we have billionaires and mega corporations that own exhaustive lists of companies and corporations. Are we headed for trillionaires and ultra-corporations that will simply own it all? What would the implications of near-total ownership by a tiny number of ultra-powerful corporations?
gpt
The literature that specifically looks at our era of capitalism as a unique one--neoliberalism--typically doesn't agree with that. The idea of a company owning as much as it can relates back to the '60s and '70s when there was a lot of antitrust regulation. Companies could not operate a monopoly in one field. As a result they went to different fields. In the long term this was not only not viable, but it wasn't even useful. Why have unrelated products? 

If you follow the argument of  David Kotz in "The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism", he argues that within neoliberalism the free market actually enters into the corporation. Instead of owning all production of a product from the start to the hands of the producers, corporations sell off the less productive and more risky sectors, instead focusing on the higher value added areas and whatever can help control the [lower-value added] production that is no longer in house.

For example, Apple does not produce computers. They produce intellectual property. The physical production is carried out on contract. They can do this because production is no longer the higher-value added component. It is development today. Combined with trademark and advertisement the contract producers are more dependent on Apple than vice versa. On top of that, if Apple had a factory and wanted to more production, they would need to sell it off first. With contract they can move as soon as the contract is done.

This also takes place in the Auto industry. The component producers are actually very overlapping--that the major three buy from many of the same component producers. They have no interest in owning that production as it is low-value added and a means to push of risk.

Another example is Walmart. That should be a prime example for the means to takeover other industries and sectors. However, their money making power is in the ability to bottleneck distribution to make other firms dependent on them, and to give them the ability to push of risk. Consumers don't like a product? Stop putting it on shelves. Walmart does not want to be a producer.

Finally, why the wealthy aren't concerned for this can be found in the literature of Transnational Capitalist Class. Check out William K. Carroll's "The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century" to see this argument. Although we're fairly diverse in terms of numbers of corporations, there is a great overlap of corporate broardmembers and corporate ownership. The notion of a corporation owning everything is not directly related to the inequality or concentration of wealth. You have some modern examples, such as Bill Gates, but that is due to the novelty of the product. That won't happen often and most wealth is going to be well diversed.

So, ultimatly it isn't about owning everything. It's about owning the highest valu-add part of the production chain and directing entities under the industry, as well as pushing off risk. In terms of trillionaires, inequality should be seen more in terms of class. Family owned empires aren't as common as they used to be.