[skinnymuch]

The three companies alone do have these moats but are outliers of outliers. Stuff we haven’t seen much of before. Combined they are worth $5.5T. All US public companies are worth $40T. The Nasdaq that they are all in has a total market cap of all companies of under $20T. Besides the two mentioned exchanges, Shanghai, and Euronext, these three companies alone might come up 5th in total market cap. They are right alongside Tokyo and Shenzen. Definitely dwarf Hong Kong and LSE.

The other big moats off the top of my head aren’t as strong but ASML, TSMC (for now), Tencent, Baidu, Yandex, Kakao Daum, are all worthy but still peanuts comparatively. I’m sure some Indian companies too.

[hollerith]

Facebook has a sizable moat: it is easy for me to join a new social network, but it is kind of pointless unless everyone I want to communicate with also joins, and it is hard to motivate them to do so. The fact that Facebook was not the first social network is evidence that that kind of moat can be crossed, but still it would be hard. And if a company starts getting traction, FB will probably offer to acquire it like they did Instagram and WhatsApp (which never was a social network, but might've become one by gradually adding features if it hadn't been acquired).

But I agree with your point: it is really hard for a new company to create a large revenue stream with a strong moat around it.