This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Leadership at consumer-facing enterprises had no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum because profits are socialized. Meanwhile the Soviet military did a much better job of keeping up with that of America because that was of upmost importance to the politburo and and successes were rewarded with political capital.
If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics).
You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly.
So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?
Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.
Is the thing keeping some other person from building Not-Amazon (or a dozen companies that effectively, together, fill its entire role—potentially better, even) that Bezos is uniquely capable, or that the existence of Amazon makes trying to do it way, way riskier than when Bezos got started, no matter how good you are?
Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?
>It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
They absolutely do. Their market share means that you must sell on them or lose a massive amount of sales. To sell on them you must agree to their anticompetitive price controls - must give them a cut, can't sell cheaper elsewhere. To get good product placement you have to agree to cominglinging and allow your legitimate product to be mixed with counterfeits.
I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours.
I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.