by
Noam Cohen
Thiel’s complaint against eBay wasn’t so much about its monopoly powers, but that it was becoming a monopoly in online payments instead of PayPal. According to Thiel, a truly free market, with perfect knowledge and perfect competition, leads to failure for everyone. “Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit,” he writes, adding the emphasis. “The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly.” Thus, the goal of any sane start-up should be to create a monopoly. When Thiel uses the term monopoly, he hastens to add, he does not mean one based on illegal bullying or government favoritism. “By ‘monopoly,’ we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute,” he writes in Zero to One, his business-advice book.
i wonder if there's any critical analysis of that last point in the book (i can't remember). why can no firm offer a close substitute? why is no one else able to replicate it, if it's lucrative enough that people would want to? if it's based on IP restrictions, then surely that's government favoritism. but if it's not, and if it instead stems from the idea that some lone genius CEO is so high IQ that no one else can come close, then, well, he's an idiot