New technology giants are in the (blue) chips

WALL Street has always valued blue chip stocks — a name derived from the highestvalue poker chip color — but today’s new blue chips are nothing like your father’s.

If there was ever any doubt about what the new blue chips are, last week’s earnings reports cast them in stone.

Long forgotten are the “old economy” companies that built our country through its indus- trial stage into the late 1990s.

In this century, the old-timers have been surpassed by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

The new blue chips produce and deploy data and bits through a network to serve their customers’ and their shareholders’ needs — much as GM and Ford produced cars and trucks to meet commuters’ and farmers’ needs last century.

Today, the du Ponts, Rockefellers, Mellons or Morgans don’t control the most chips any more. It’s the Jeff Bezos-Mark Zuckerberg-Sergey Brin bunch — and, of course, the late Steve Jobs would be included if he were still with us.

In today’s market, it takes the values of GM and Ford combined to rival Netflix.

If you combined the nation’s two largest banks, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, you still are $50 billion short of the market value of Google. Those two banks control trillions of dollars, making Google’s 40-something cofounders Brin and Larry Page even richer and more powerful.

Airlines, considered blue chip stocks for most of the last century, are dwarfed in today’s stock market.

Even mega-carriers Delta and United, combined with Union Pacific Railroad, only equal about $187 billion in value vs. Facebook’s $500 billion.

Amazon’s $485 billion market cap is so vast that it could afford to buy old-economy blue chippers Walmart, Target and Home Depot, then buy Macy’s, Sears and the Gap and still have spare change.

Today’s 800-pound blue chip gorilla is undoubtedly Apple, which has changed the way so much of the world works.

Jukeboxes now fit in your pocket, along with your camera, cellphone, compass, flashlight, and alarm clock, not to mention e-mail, spreadsheets and written documents. And for changing our world, Apple is afforded an almost $800 billion market capitalization, the largest in the world.

To put the sheer size to scale, imagine combining IBM, McDonald’s, Boeing, United Technologies, Goldman Sachs, American Express and DuPont. That’s what it would take to rival Apple’s market capitalization.

For a century, the American capitalist icons were the Rockefellers, the du Ponts and the Mellons. Maybe we should call today’s new American capitalists the “Young Rocka-fellas.”