>>514739746
Well consider the Mars family. They got wealthy by fattening up americans with addictive candy products, and employed a deliberate strategy of monoplizing shelf space and limiting competitors.
The free market works to the extent people are rational calculators making decisions for self interest. The moment you include a vice like greed, or gambling into that equation, they start making irrational decisions and it's an exploit.
The Walton family got rich through similar means, by creating a large vertically-integrated network that controls trade from overseas into regionally monoplistic big-box stores.
They own the supplier, the transport, the distributor, the whole chain. If things were broken up so any company could have an equal chance to buy those imported goods, walmart would not exist as it does today
Go down the list, they're all exploiting some hack in the system.
How about Jeff Bezos? Amazon is what we call a "network monopoly". It's inefficient to provide 2 parallel distribution networks across the country, so the market naturally settled on a monopoly provider. Just as it's inefficient to have 2 duplicate sets of water pipes to everyone's house just to provide "competition"