Thiel opened his Stanford lecture with what he called his 'single idee fixe' — the one business idea he was completely obsessed with. His thesis inverted conventional wisdom: competition, far from being virtuous, was actually a sign of failure. He illustrated this with a devastating comparison between the U.S. airline industry and Google. Airlines generated $195 billion in domestic revenue but had cumulative profits of approximately zero across their entire hundred-year history. Google, with just $50 billion in revenue, was worth four times the entire airline industry combined. The difference was monopoly: Google dominated search with 66% market share, while airlines competed themselves into perpetual near-bankruptcy. Thiel's provocation — that capitalism and competition are antonyms — challenged everything taught in Econ 101, but the numbers were hard to argue with.