Comment by silvajoao
17 years ago
Recently I compared Portugal's GDP with the revenue of a couple of companies. A workforce of 5.52 million from a population of 10.71 million produces around $244.64 billion; Microsoft, Apple and Google combined employ around 148 thousand people and have $112.71 billion revenue.
So the point is perhaps that Facebook will make Zuckerberg (where does Zuckerman come from?) wealthy enough to be able to afford a developed yet relatively poor country, some time in the future.
That the example happened to pick Portugal is a funny coincidence (I'm portuguese too). For those who don't know, mocking the country's politics and economy is the all-time favourite national sport here.
(BTW: the source for the numbers was Wikipedia)
You can't really compare the output of a tech company with that of a country. For instance, according to your example:
That boils down to about 750k per employee, much, much higher than the GDP per capita of any country in the world. Even the US, with a labour force of 155 Million and a GDP of 14.441 Trillion, or about 93k per worker (or 44k per capita), still about 8x (17x) less than the MAG trio.
Sounds about right.