Tech Economics

Transfer pricing lets multinationals charge their own subsidiaries for intellectual property, shifting billions in taxable income to low-rate jurisdictions. It's legal, widespread, and worth understanding.

When Apple or Oracle buys back its own stock instead of funding research, that's not financial engineering. It's a confession about where growth actually comes from.

Uber owns no cars. Airbnb owns no hotels. The most valuable companies in tech figured out that ownership is a liability, not an asset.

Tech companies aren't bad at business. They're playing a different game, and the rules are written in accounting language most investors never bother to read.

The biggest winners in tech didn't satisfy existing demand. They manufactured awareness of a problem, then sold the solution.

Amazon, Google, and Apple don't price hardware to make money on hardware. Here's the actual business model hiding behind the discount.

SaaS companies don't charge per seat because it's simpler. They do it because it turns their customers into unwitting salespeople.

Google's famous free food program wasn't a perk. It was a calculated labor strategy that reshaped how the entire industry thinks about compensation.

The sequence in which major platforms enter new geographies is a calculated playbook, not opportunism. Here's how it actually works.

Founders don't over-raise because they're bad at math. They over-raise because the funding round is doing a job that has nothing to do with building software.

Apple, Google, and Meta sit at the top of global market caps while owning a fraction of the physical assets of older industrial giants. The accounting explains why.

The losses aren't accidents or inefficiency. They're a deliberate land-grab financed by investors who understand exactly what they're buying.

Loss leaders aren't about being generous. They're about making switching costs so high that leaving becomes practically irrational.

Slack, AWS, Gmail, and dozens of other products succeeded externally because they were forged under the pressure of real internal use. The pattern is not coincidence.

The official story is software complexity. The real story is upgrade cycles, services revenue, and a business model built on obsolescence.

When VCs fund direct competitors, the conventional explanation is risk management. The real explanation is more interesting and more cold-blooded.

The Kindle wasn't a product. It was a toll booth. Understanding how Amazon built it reveals the playbook every major tech company now runs.

The per-gigabyte price of cloud storage has fallen for decades. Your AWS bill has not. Understanding why requires looking past the pricing page.