Consider the monopoly secret again: competition and capitalism are opposites. If you didn’t already know it, you could discover it the natural, empir… - Peter Thiel

Their technology probably would have worked at scale, but it could have worked only at scale: it required every computer to join the network at the same time, and that was never going to happen. Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.

So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It’s a relic of history.
Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals
and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an
equilibrium state of perfect competition because that’s what’s easy to model, not because it
represents the best of business. But it’s worth recalling that the long-run equilibrium predicted by
19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to
rest — also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a
powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.

If the tendency of monopoly businesses were to hold back progress, they would be dangerous and we’d be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents.