[onion2k]

VCs all read Peter Thiel's book 'Zero to One' and embraced the idea of owning a monopoly. Rather than starting a business that grows and outperforms all the competitors, they're just leveraging massive sums of money to buy all the competitors to create one instead.

[keiferski]

That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation of the book’s main idea, which is better stated that you should seek to invent something entirely new that is a defacto monopoly, rather than engage in competition with others doing the same (old) thing. His background in the hyper competitive world of law was the key connection point toward that realization. Basically, he says that ambitious people often end up competing against each other in law/consulting/finance etc. but they should invent something new instead.

[SJC_Hacker]

Yeah but lawyers/consultants/financiers still make bank

[toss1]

US politicians stopped valuing actual capitalism and stopped supporting anti-trust actions, accelerated by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision essentially equating money to free speech and allowing effectively unlimited corporate political donations.

Since then, there has been no downside to becoming an effective monopoly, so why make a better product?

Theil and his followers are exploiting a weakness in the system. If they can take all the money, why should they give a flip about anyone else in the system that supports their lifestyle? After all, it may take until they are dead for it to collapse.