I think you miss a critical fact:
They absolutely understand that. They also see money/power as a finite resource and absolutely do not want any new competition to emerge via anything that could be created or funded by anything they do not control.
They absolutely understand that. They also see money/power as a finite resource and absolutely do not want any new competition to emerge via anything that could be created or funded by anything they do not control.
Some of them do realize the actual situation and are ladder pulling, but mixed in with that there's also a pervasive offshoot of hyper narcissistic survivorship bias that in my experience a lot of modern tech entrepreneurs suffer from where they really are actually shockingly blind to the build-up of everything that they then built on.
Like the Internet existing for them is taken as just a given like the earth and the seas being here, but "taxi cabs you hail through the internet"... that's the real invention!