Chorus Limited
A monopoly that cannot sell to customers — and doesn’t need to.
Economics
The attempt to model people, who decline to cooperate.
- 7
- in business
- 11:07
- average
- 78 min
- in total
- 36
- across the network
All briefs
PayPal
eBay Inc. · 1998
eBay acquired PayPal on October 3, 2002, for $1.4–$1.5 billion. It shut down its competing Billpoint service three months later. PayPal became the dominant, user-chosen payment method on eBay — used in over 70% of auctions and ~25% of closed listings — and by Q3 2012 accounted for 40% of eBay’s revenue ($1.37B). The deal was not about innovation. It was about controlling the checkout.
Spark New Zealand
Spark isn’t a digital disruptor — it’s a privatised utility that outsourced its wires and kept the brand.
HDFC Bank
India’s largest private bank isn’t built on innovation — it’s built on being too big to fail.
ICICI Bank
K.V. Kamath · 1994
ICICI Bank’s 1994 formation under K.V. Kamath was not the birth of a startup but the strategic repackaging of a state-backed institution into a private, technology-enabled, acquisitive financial group — with real execution in regulation-constrained conditions.
Société Générale
A bank built to serve French industry in 1864 now survives not by reinvention, but by scale, supervision, and systemic weight.
Berkshire Hathaway
Warren Buffett · 1955
Berkshire Hathaway is a holding company built on arbitrage, insurance float, and concentrated control — not innovation or disruption.