Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

Even the subtitle of this article basically enforces that fact:

> Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user

As you say, it's a private taxi for your burrito. When you factor in the labor costs, gas/car maint costs, and the amortized cost of providing the service, it's hard to see why anyone would think $15 for an on-demand delivery in a major urban area is abnormal.

>> Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition.

For context, here is the second sentence related to the above:

  Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as 
  retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific 
  entities is irrelevant.

I believe this relevant to the below.

> Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy.

This scenario is not relevant to "big business", but instead describes a sole proprietorship with an assumption of a known fungible value. It also does not account for consumable goods and/or transient services. In any event, by your own definition below:

> Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before.

Either you have not "become wealthy", as you "traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks" or the effectual value of money exceeds the purchase value of the "million dollar painting". Both cannot be true.

Back to my statement of corporate earnings beyond operational costs being a concentration of wealth. I believe we can agree on the following:

- Any for-profit company has as its purpose the goal of accounts receivable (AR) exceeding accounts payable (AP) over time.

- There are a limited number of recipients regarding profit distribution for any given company.

- Those having no direct or indirect ownership of a given company do not receive profit distributions.

If we agree on the above, then the larger the profits, the larger the distributions. Since the set of people qualifying for profit distributions are less than the set of all people having no investment relation to the company, it follows that said profits are enjoyed by fewer entities than those strictly involved in the AR side of the ledger.

Hence a concentration of wealth into the organization.

I expect some open-source, distributed, and free service will disrupt all of this

> This is essentially the story of capitalism

FTFY

> Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale

There's been plenty of national and global monopolies (I mean, that's literally why we had Antitrust laws made in the 1890's) as well as industries with only a couple players in a market.

In fact, if you name any industry, it's probably led by just 3-5 corporations. Mobile service? Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. Television news? Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Fox, Warner Bros. Liquor? AB InBev, Diageo, Pernod, Suntory, Bacardi. Wine? E&J Gallo, The Wine Group, Constellation. Beer? Ab InBev, Heineken, Snow Breweries. Cars? Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Stellantis. Airlines? Delta, American, United, Southwest, Lufthansa. Oil and gas? Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, PetroChina, Shell. Music? Universal, Sony, Warner. Coke, Pepsi, Keurig.

This is what capitalism does. By definition it grows as large as it possibly can, shutting out competitors.

Every country has the talent, software development isn't some esoteric knowledge. But even if you imagine that only people in developed countries are capable of writing software, there is Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Taiwan for starters.

I don't think it makes sense to focus on the US when three of the five companies in the article are from Germany, Netherlands and China. The problem is not America per se, it's the pattern of large and often (but not always) foreign companies extracting wealth from what used to be hyper-local operations.