Essay author here. Success-to-the-successful is a real feature of our current economic landscape, more than in the semi-recent past (yes, ancient feudal societies were way worse). Here’s Harvard Business Review:

“… we find that large corporations are more and more likely to maintain their dominant positions, while small corporations are less and less likely to become big and profitable.” Link: https://hbr.org/2019/08/the-gap-between-large-and-small-comp...

Here’s economist Austan Goolsbee in The New York Times highlighting growing corporate concentration even pre-pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/business/big-companies-ar...

These are success-to-the-successful trends.

Disruptive shocks (like when Google created a truly better search technology and dethroned AltaVista in the late ‘90s, or when the US gov broke up AT&T in 1984) can change those dynamics. That’s how Kodak, despite having lots of resources, lost dominance and eventually failed: they didn’t have the right non-monetary resources (innovative culture and support for change) at a critical time, so disruptive shock toppled them.

Anyway, thanks for reading!