https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-com...
Big money doesn't equate smart money.
But now that the dollar is cheap (by 1995 standards) and the billionaires aplenty, maybe we should look at 5 or 10-billionaires for our next study.
[ Edited to add: Actually you do not even need to downsize 25% to 20%. Take a 1% erosion per year and you get there anyways. So basically the odds of someone losing billionaire status were about 1% per year. Quite a low chance of failure. And quite a high chance of death in comparison.]
a better label for your stats is that it takes 20 years for a family to figure out how to hide their wealth.
But your inter-generational theory has a major contradiction. You're asserting that each generation of ambitious workers takes ownership of the capital of previous generations, and that this same capital is inherited by incompetent heirs. They can't both be true.
If the heirs of capital continued to exist from one generation to the next, then there would be a vested interest in Uber's success across generations, undermining the argument the poster is making.
While their valuation might be too high now, it is really good business that doesn’t require a monopoly to be successful.
I'm starting to think that many of the most successful tech companies of the past decade are not real monopolies but succeeded purely because the centralization of capital made it difficult for alternative projects to compete for a limited period of time. Even projects with strong network effects are unlikely to last forever.
The reason why all these dominant companies won't last forever is simply because every new generation of ambitious workers needs a way to legally take ownership of the capital which was accumulated by the previous generation. People who inherit free capital from their parents or relatives will never be as smart, hard working, determined or as capable as those who've had to struggle all their lives; especially now with an internet where essentially all knowledge is in the public domain. As monopolies get bigger and stronger, smart and ambitious people will adapt to the environment in extreme ways and find legal ways to subvert them.
When you see extremely high valuations which assume that the company will have a monopoly in 20 years, it's a red flag because in 20 years' time, political and economic control will have already been passed on to the next generation; a generation which will have no skin in the game and 0 interest in seeing that company succeed.