> Impressed at the commentary here,

Me too, honestly. I'm also kind of shocked. I want to expand on your last point.

Uber became a billion dollar business by running an illegal taxi service. Now I like the ability to book a taxi from my phone with seamless payment. I also dealt with the yellow cabs in NYC in years gone by and it sucked. Shift changes, annoying looping ads you couldn't turn off, card skimming, the process of hailing a cab sucked and the cabs themselves tended to be bad. All that is true but it was still illegal.

AirBNB became a billion dollar company by allowing people to run illegal hotels in residential neighborhoods. This was value extraction from all the neighbors who had to live with the externalities created but gained nothing from it. That value was extracted by people who usually didn't live there. Agree with it or not, it was generally illegal, particularly in their large profit centers like NYC.

There is a lot of this that goes on and, honestly, is the entire basis for private equity. Private equity looks for companies that have what they call "pricing power", which is a form of "inelastic demand". Housing, for example, has inelastic demand. But it also includes creating regional monopolies like buying up all the vets or medical practices in an area and then jacking up the price of all of them. You're not going to drive 5 hours for most medical treatment.

This can sometimes go wrong. KKR bought Envision Healthcare, an amergency medicine contracting company, and unlocked "pricing power" by intentinoally using out-of-network services wherever possible to charge a lot more. Lots of medical practices do this actually. Anyway, their business was effectively killed when the No Surprises Act [1], which interestingly was signed into law by Donald Trump in his lame duck period after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-the-no-surp...