How? How can a billionaire prevent competition without siccing the government on them through tariffs, regulatory hurdles, licenses, etc...

Artifically low prices, endless and expensive litigation (unless you count that as government siccing), corporate espionage, bribery, acquisition, extortion, etc.

Is it really that hard to think of what you could do with a coporate money and know government intervention?

If your answer the question of how being a billionaire leads to monopoly is 'crime', I'll have you know that that can be done independent of billionaire status.

A billion ways.

Here's just one: run at a loss until your competition is driven out of business. Then raise prices once you're a monopoly again. (This isn't a hypothetical either, but a standard practice.)

This doesn't work. You can cut prices and lose money until the upstart firms go out of business, but you cannot raise them afterwards or guess what will happen?

Potential upstarts can't get funding to start their business, because investors know you'll just bully them back out of the market.

Unless they find another billionaire with pockets as deep as yours, and a willingness to wage a price war for years.

You'll become Walmart?

Walmart has low prices on everything. If they are charging monopoly prices, why is their margin 3%?

Buying up all the land that contains a particular resource then guarding it, thus permanently locking said resource away is one way to monopolize a market vertical.

If there had ever been such a person, even once, it seems like we'd be celebrating them today. If you could send a guy back 200 years to keep all the coal in the ground, you'd do it.

There are very few that will celebrate De Beers implementation of this monopoly business model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues

De Beers does not have a monopoly. Look up their market share.

They had an effective monopoly, until their control of supply was broken: http://www.paulzimnisky.com/a-brief-history-of-de-beers

By market forces. Competition, when permitted to exist, produces net benefits.

What does this have to do with billionaires? Everyone does from private citizens to governments do this, and land itself has value whether there are resources are not.

Can you give me one example of a billionaire doing this?

They can finance the dumping of product at below market rates until they run the competition out of business, then corner the market for themselves.

You cannot corner a market through price dumping. You can lose money until the newer firm dies, but once you raise prices again, guess what happens? The Baltimore Gas Company is a famous example of this. They didn't establish their monopoly until the maryland legislature enforced a utility charter that granted them the exclusive right to distribute gas in Baltimore.

I would disagree. Billionaires and mega companies are able to pioneer and validate ideas that smaller companies may not be able to due to financial or operational restraints.

But once an idea is validated smaller competitors come in and start picking off verticals. Shopify and it’s 100,000+ stores are around in large part due to Amazon not only validating and producing best practices for the e-commerce model but also in building the foundational infrastructure (AWS) for smaller companies to leverage.

There are major benefits to having mega companies and billionaires around, and particularly having them in your country. Albeit, I agree, we do need to come up with a better tax strategy for the ultra wealthy.

> I would disagree. Billionaires and mega companies are able to pioneer and validate ideas that smaller companies may not be able to due to financial or operational restraints.

Sorry, you mean that billionaires and megacorps are able to profit off of ideas pioneered and validated by publically-funded research institutes? I don't see how their inability to do so would be a loss to society.

What would be your idea to ensure scaled, cost-effective production of the ideas that come from these institutions?

And we can’t consider an idea validated until it is brought to market.

> And we can’t consider an idea validated until it is brought to market.

I see you've designed your test to guarantee the result you want.

You don’t billionaires to validate new ideas, and amazon was not started by a billionaire . Billionaires rarely If ever have created a brand new industry or idea to fruition

A billion dollar market is not the same a billionaire . You need the former you don’t need the later .

If you’re a billionaire, it’s likely hard to understand why you’re the problem (as well as an economic system configured that allowed such wealth concentration).

I don't understand what this Whataboutism has to do with the topic at hand.

You’re commenting like you won, but everyone else is just confused what your original point was.

I don’t know too many billionaires who can have me arrested and incarcerated for the rest of my life.

I guess you just know the wrong (right?) billionaires.

It’s not silly at all. I’m far more afraid of the government who has the power to lock me up for the rest of my life (as has the system set up to do so) than some random billionaire.