Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.
The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.
It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
