Umm... eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn't a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.

All of these types "stand on the shoulders of giants" as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they're sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.

Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.

I believe in a well-regulated market he wouldn't have found success like he did. Running for 8 years off of parents and VC/stock influx of millions of dollars screams anti-competitive to me. At the very least if we had decent privacy protection laws then the early data harvesting and business application probably would've been looked into at the start and shutdown, or else the company broken up from a monopoly once it started strangling whole sectors.