Everything Peter Thiel has said about competition & monopoly
Thiel holds that capitalism and competition are antonyms: every durable business escapes competition by building a monopoly, starting from a small market it can dominate, expanding concentrically, and lasting as the last mover in its category.
6 points · 4 appearances · 2015–2017
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6 points · 3 appearances · 2015
“One sort of question is always like, what great business is nobody building? There's a more intellectual version of it, which I always like to ask as an interview question. It's: tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on. And this turns out to be a shockingly hard question for people to answer, and it's hard because, for one thing, it's hard because we've just been taught that truth is conventional. The truth is whatever everybody agrees on, and so coming up with something new that people don't already agree on puts us in a very uncomfortable sort of a place. It sounds like it's really hard to do this, and so you have to be really, really brilliant, so we think. But the other reason it's a very tough question to answer is because you sort of think about the literal dynamic of an interview, where I'm asking the question to somebody, and then give me an answer, and it's like, oh yeah, I already thought that, or I agree with that — that's the wrong answer. And so that the right answer is one that, in some sense, people might not agree with, and so it, I think, often requires quite a bit of courage to come up with an answer that people haven't thought of.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”