We often describe capitalism with the cliché of a big fish eating smaller fish. One predator, one victim.
But that’s not really how many modern markets work.
In biology, success creates resistance. If a predator grows too large, it starves. If it wipes out too much prey, the system collapses and resets. Physics enforces a hard speed limit on size.
In parts of today’s economy, success does the opposite.
Corporations don’t have bodies. They don’t suffer the same metabolic drag. As they grow, size often makes them stronger: capital attracts more capital, scale lowers costs, and distribution reinforces itself. At a certain point, these organizations stop behaving like organisms and start behaving more like massive objects in space.
Gravity is a better metaphor than predation.
What looks like competition from the outside often isn’t. Multiple brands may appear independent, but many quietly orbit the same center—shared ownership, infrastructure, or incentives. To customers, it feels like choice. Structurally, it’s consolidation. Less ecosystem, more accretion disk.
This doesn’t require villains or conspiracies. It’s what happens when positive feedback loops operate without strong counterforces.
You see the pattern everywhere: How many CPU brands today? Disk drives? Operating systems? Airlines, brewers, payment networks, web-hosting groups?
Not every collection of brands is an ecosystem. Some are closer to gravity wells.