See, I don't know, and I like to think that if I did I'd write a famous book about it or something, but it's just hard to say. On the one hand, it's a bit unfair of me to sort of present it as "post WWII capitalism ruined everything," even if only in the idealist sense that I'm a leftist and would generally maintain that capitalism always ruined everything. But also in the real sense that, while the Bell system (like the railroads) was very wrapped up in this spiritual American ideal of expansion, it also served the primary purpose of making a few founders and investors extremely rich. It's not like enriching the shareholders was invented in 1950.

On the other hand, it's hard not to feel like there is something qualitatively different about the barons (and their businesses) of the 19th to early 20th century and what we have today. Consider some of the great business empires of the early 20th century - General Electric, Standard Oil, the AT&SF... They were viewed as practically synonymous with the American ideal (a view which is clearly myopic in consideration of e.g. their treatment of labor, but which I think was nonetheless widely held). Then look at some of our biggest companies today... The FAANG companies, but also Wal-Mart, the oil companies... almost as a rule they are mired in controversy and entangled in politics in a way that is far more publicly visible than the (equally deep) entanglement of earlier companies.

Perhaps the first part is the, well, bad part: major industries in the early 20th century were, broadly speaking, not at all above bribing government officials and pulling of remarkably dastardly schemes to get legislation and policy changed in their favor. But it seems like this generally played out outside of the public view and was often only discovered later. On the other hand, modern tech companies are still assaulting the law head-on but do it in an extremely public way, more or less using their customers as the ammunition. They're just much more visibly scofflaws. Part of this might reflect simple power dynamics... Uber no longer needs to bring in the Pinkertons to quash a labor revolt, they can basically just say "no" and apply a little sedition and they get their way due to scale. Not to say that I think they're necessarily above putting down a strike by force, but it's 2020 - the strike will never happen in the first place [you might detect that I am a leftist, but a cynical one].

I think a big part of the picture though has to do with the modern financial ecosystem. Most of the titans of old were associated with a prominent founder, and most of them were just as much big personalities as Steve Jobs. It's somewhat amusing to see the discussion of "fake news" as such a modern phenomena when newspaper giant W. R. Hearst had a nearly national fleet of papers publishing exclusively his own opinions for decades. Just in the telephone system, Bell was not only an important inventor but also a very rabid advocate of some downright detestable viewpoints - he was a big supporter of compulsory sterilization of the poor. You might call him sort of a Peter Thiel of his day, although I'm not sure which of those two I'm being more unkind to with that comparison.

We still have this kinds of big personalities today, bizarre opinions and temper tantrums to boot (Elon Musk provides enough drama to make up for a dozen sane "founders"). But with limited exceptions even with multi-class stock and bizarre ownership schemes and all I just don't think they have the kind of single-handed power over their companies that was common a century ago. This has a tendency to push all companies towards behavior that is desirable for the investors rather than desirable for the founders. On top of that, there's sort of an odd split-brained system where, in the tech industry, investors tend to be broadly split into institutional investors that buy into established companies and want stability and growth (e.g. turning Google more and more away from a quirky tech company and into another Oracle), and venture capitalists, Masayoshi Son a particularly dramatic example, who are playing by their own rulebooks that for the most part emphasize growth above all else. Growth has always been desirable for companies but at a degree it becomes pathological, and venture capital seems engineered to push companies to this point as rapidly as possible.

Cyrus Holliday of the AT&SF was a founder and, like many of the time and many today, also a politician. His investors were many but they were largely looking for growth that was steady rather than exponential. Railroads in general "disrupted" transportation but no one at the time was looking at it that way, and many of the decisions made (such as the land grant arrangement) were very much long-term plays rather than short-term ones---aimed towards building a physical empire, not merely a large customer base. Really my point is, though, Holliday and his successors were basically trusted to make decisions on their own with comparatively little pressure from investors (who couldn't even practically be involved day to day because it took time for news to travel), and through a slow, plodding approach to growth they more or less made the anglo Southwest from whole cloth.

Investors today just don't seem to do that kind of thing... they either want exponential growth with almost no concern paid to other issues (where users go, the money will follow, they seem to think, although centuries of experience have shown that this is not a safe assumption), or they want to stabilize their portfolio by getting businesses to act just like all of the others. While the "tech community" has a real obsession with charismatic founders, it seems like the success of companies is more or less correlated with how little power the founder actually wields. WeWork imploded while SpaceX has given Elon Musk a play set to keep him busy while they do the actual work. Once tech companies reach a certain size the undergo a slow and very awkward transition from one to the other, more or less once they reach the point where exponential growth is no longer possible because they already count just about everyone in several continents as a customer.

All just my opinions, but there they are.