site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.

I don't think this list particularly works apart from the Musk companies. Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend and I don't think I am an outlier. Apple use contract manufacturers. Most of what I streamed on Netflix when I had a subscription was not Netflix original content, which mostly sucks. I can't comment about BYD and Xiaomi specifically, but one thing everyone who writes about the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem says is how much of its edge comes from the ability to buy intermediate inputs in a friction-free way because someone else is making them just down the road, and is happy to take on a rush order.

That said, "big companies are internal planned economies and their existence partially refutes the socialist calculation argument" is old hat - Coase wrote The Nature of the Firm in 1937 and Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State in 1967.

Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend

Apparently it's one of the very few commodity products on there that actually has any margin. If this is true, I'll expect Amazon to eventually displace the competition, they are very experienced in the practice...

Then there's the publishing, their on demand book printing, the ebook business. And Amazon is highly vertically integrated even outside of those two, though. The data centers, the software in them, the warehouses, the trucks, ect. The market cannot offer them a competing product on any of those, although they are essentially commodities that other, similar business still get on the market.

Apple is similar. They use contractors on the low margin stuff and the things they absolutely cannot do themselves (SOTA chip fab), but keep the rest of the value add for themselves, and use the additional control that gets them to deliver a superior product directly to their own stores.

I don't understand Netflix either, but that might just be taste. Apparently their slop gets views - obligatory views at that, keeping their audience captive - and thus makes money. Make they are just lying about their metrics. But that would probably be fraud, I don't know. Maybe the average normie really forgets what he's subscribed to.

I know the idea is old, it's the only attack on efficient markets that makes sense. And there were vertically integrated business empires before, but never this many, this successful and seemingly this necessary to compete on product.