All the technology giants will be filing their 2024 annual reports by late January, and they’re all likely to report gobs and gobs of net income; but how many gobs of net income, exactly, compared to the rest of Corporate America? 

After all, one popular theory in financial analysis in recent years is that earnings from the tech giants have been pulling away from the rest of large corporations, devouring an ever-larger share of total net income. So using our Multi-Company database page, the crack Calcbench research pulled net income numbers for the S&P 500 for the last seven years, and then mapped out what share of total net income went to eight tech giants compared to all other firms. 

The eight firms we classified as tech giants are:

• Amazon ($AMZN)

• Apple ($AAPL)

• Broadcom ($AVGO)

• Facebook ($META)

• Google ($GOOG)

• Microsoft ($MSFT)

• Netflix ($NFLX)

• Nvidia ($NVDA)

The results are in Figure 1, below.

As you can see, the share of net income from the tech giants (in red) has essentially doubled: from 10.2 percent of all S&P 500 net income in 2017 to 20.9 percent of all net income in 2023.

Put another way, net income for the non-tech giants went from $894.1 billion in 2017 to $1.43 trillion in 2023, an increase of 59.8 percent. Net income for the eight tech giants, however, soared by 270 percent — from $101.9 billion to $377.7 billion in that same seven-year period.

Figure 2, below, puts more precise numbers on the trend and also shows the percentage of earnings going to the tech giants. 

Wow. It’s especially impressive to see the pandemic-scarred year of 2020, where the tech giants kept propelling net income upward even as all other S&P 500 companies saw net income fall sharply. On the other hand, in the inflation-scarred year of 2022, net income for all other companies only declined by 12.9 percent; for the tech giants, it fell 19.2 percent.

What will 2024 earnings look like? Ask us again in about four weeks, once most of the S&P 500 (and all of the tech giants) have filed their annual reports. For now, we can see that the tech giants are accounting for a larger share of total earnings — but the progression is not nearly as linear and constant as one might assume.