With all due respect, I think this is a poorly-conceived point by Thiel. Airlines create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year precisely because th

With all due respect, I think this is a poorly-conceived point by Thiel. Airlines create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year precisely because they make 17 cents per passenger. If it cost a traveler $900 to fly from Dallas to New York, nobody would fly except for only the wealthiest passengers and those who had dire business needs. Now suppose a company came along and developed a way for inexpensive planes to fly by themselves without pilots, airports, or flight attendants (forget the technicalities like FAA requirements for a second). Now suddenly people can fly from New York to LA for $30 round trip, twenty times a day. It ruins the airline industry. And yet in spite of destroying the current airline industry as we know it, now even more value is being created for the economy. This is the same logic that people use to argue against unions- that just because you can charge a higher fee than market conditions would otherwise allow, doesn't mean that you are serving society well. Clearly Thiel is on the side of the megacorp with his logic, and I realize that his advice is more of a game strategy targeted at entrepreneurs than a suggested means to a utopia for everyone, but to ignore the larger picture is somewhat delusional IMO.