Amazon is the most disruption-proof big tech company, venture capitalist Fred Wilson says

Of major technology companies like Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon, Amazon's e-commerce business is the least likely to be heavily disrupted, venture capitalist Fred Wilson said Wednesday.

"Amazon might be the most disruption-protected," Wilson said. "They built a really diverse set of businesses, and as a result, I think that they have a stool with like, 10 legs on it. Even if two or three of them get knocked out, they're still going to have a great business. And Amazon Web Services, in particular, is just a really amazing business. Most of our portfolio companies run on it."

Wilson is a partner at Union Square Ventures, an early investor in internet companies like Stripe, Twilio, LendingClub, Etsy, Tumblr, Twitter and Indeed. He spoke from the Techonomy NYC conference.

Wilson said Amazon Prime is CEO Jeff Bezos' "genius" business model that allows the company to subsidize its entertainment offerings with its shipping business.

"I don't know whether it was an accident or whether Bezos figured this out 10 years ago, but Prime is giving them a competitive advantage in the television business. It's giving them a competitive advantage in the music business," Wilson said. "By the way it is anti-competitive, let's just be honest about that. ... Retail is really suffering — particularly brick-and-mortar retail. It's not just Amazon but Amazon's obviously the big gorilla in that space. It's not all good."

By comparison, Wilson said, he's found that businesses that appear similarly dominant — like Facebook and Google in advertising — suffer from waning influence.

"We had a gathering of the CEOs of all our portfolio companies — we do it once year," Wilson said. "The thing that came out, surprisingly, is that people are not using social media anymore. The CEOs of these companies are not using social media anymore, other than to promote themselves and their companies. They have unfollowed everybody, and they are just using it for the broadcast mechanism. And I think a lot of us feel that way."

Wilson said that the minute President Donald Trump was elected, he muted the word "Trump" on social media.

"I don't follow Trump — I have opted out of that," Wilson said. "It's counterproductive. .... Trump is a troll, and what we must do to trolls is we must ignore trolls. They get their power from us paying attention to them. We have to just stop paying attention to him. The democracy and political system will take care of him in due course. .... and we will go on and do other things, like fix the f------ health-care system — that would be more productive."

Wilson said consumers will slowly begin to opt out of Facebook when they realize the downsides of the current internet model — problems like cybersecurity breaches, data collection and the concentration of corporate finance in Wall Street. Instead, Wilson posited, virtual currencies powered by blockchain could allow people to easily pay for decentralized services like Wikipedia — services that are free today because they are difficult to monetize with advertising.

"I think that what happened to Microsoft in the late '90s will happen to them, we just don't know when," Wilson said. "They are optimizing around an attention-driven business model. Somebody will create a new business model that is not attention driven, the way that the attention-driven business model disrupted the enterprise software business model. And they won't be able to react to it quickly enough, and they will get disrupted."

Still, Wilson said it's unlikely that any of the big tech companies will be snuffed out overnight.

"Even Amazon will be impacted by it," Wilson said. "Microsoft got massively impacted by the internet — just massively impacted. ... But they're still around. None of these companies will go out of business."

He pointed to the positive forces of technology, like genetic testing, flying cars, machine learning and flying cars.

"The architecture of the internet is beautiful, but there are a bunch of things it doesn't do very well," Wilson said. "We've got to fix those things."