Ok but startups don't get a free pass in this debate. Startups that capture wealth by creating value that wouldn't exist otherwise are, in my opinion, unquesti

Ok but startups don't get a free pass in this debate. Startups that capture wealth by creating value that wouldn't exist otherwise are, in my opinion, unquestionably good, even if they increase inequality. But don't some of them try to capture wealth by striving to get monopolistic positions using network effects, mergers and acquisitions and such? Didn't Peter Thiel even write a book promoting this? Capturing wealth through a monopoly on things that would otherwise have been created by competitors and that would yield lower margins if it wasn't for the monopolistic features of the specific market, is not that ethically different from theft. A lot of technologies are a small jump from previous building blocks. Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee are responsible for a huge core part of the innovations Facebook and others rely on but it's Zuckerberg who made all the money because he captured a natural monopoly, not because he created more value than Kahn and Berners-Lee. Twitter is a simplistic and obvious product that someone else would have created a long time ago if it hadn't already existed. If it wasn't for network effects, how do we know there wouldn't be another social network providing 10x the value to its users than the current ones? The monopolistic network effects _prevents_ this kind of innovation through competition. I'm not saying people shouldn't get a chance to be well compensated for the risk they take and the effort they put but even in startup world, at a certain level of very high inequality, when inequality reducing free market competition forces don't seem to be materializing for long periods of time, suspicions of an unethical and detrimental ecosystem can reasonably be justified.