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Celebrated physicist Geoffrey West once observed that cities exhibit superlinear growth, meaning that as a city gets bigger, every person there becomes more productive. However, companies exhibit the opposite trend. Companies are nearly always killed by bureaucracy and administration crowding out creativity and innovation. Because, inside a company, "someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff".

Which is why, in the aftermath of the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into what became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and other spinoffs, the value of what had been Standard Oil doubled within a year

From Imperica - New knowledge for creative polymaths - Google and Facebook: the real reason they should be broken up is China.

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There’s a very interesting NPR Planet Money podcast about this, explaining how far from impoverishing Rockefeller, the break up greatly enriched him since he owned shares in all of the other oil companies! The point is that the goal of competition policy is not to take money away from (for example) Mark Zuckerberg but to create more wealth in the economy. The goal is to increase the net welfare and we know that competition is the way to do it. Noted internet investor Peter Thiel fully understands the fascist nature of monopoly capitalism and went so far as to write a book encouraging new businesses to aim for monopoly positions in order to obtain the best returns. What’s best for America, as they used to say, may not be what’s best for General Motors.

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