Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.
Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.
People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.
