George Gilder on the buildout of internet infrastructure (2000)

ASAP: Why is it important we build an all-optical network? 

Gilder: Optical networks are vital to the fulfillment of the business plans of the Internet economy and the future of world peace and prosperity.  We already have an all-optical network in the critical paths of large portions of the infrastructure--chiefly the passive parts.  It will rapidly spread over the next five years to reach into campuses, enterprises, and cities. 

ASAP: So I take it you don't think the promises surrounding this all-optical network have been overstated?

Gilder: They have been drastically understated by companies that want to retrofit optics into the old system rather than create a new network that fulfills the intrinsic promise of a worldwide web of glass and light. 

~ George Gilder, "Gilder On Optics," by Eric W. Pfeiffer, Forbes ASAP, August 21, 2000

(Quote provided by Fred Hickey in a July 15, 2024 tweet.)

George Gilder on the role of the entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is the creative force in economics.  The entrepreneur is the person who comes and looks at a desert or a jungle or a wilderness and sees a garden, sees an opportunity to create new value.  Without the entrepreneur, economies are barren, they're dead.

~ George Gilder, The Call of the Entrepreneur (2007)

George Gilder on Google, Facebook and the limits of their free model

Q: In your book Life After Google, you discuss some of the tech giants' flawed business models today may not allow them to survive.  Can you elaborate on that?

A: I think companies like Google and Facebook that collect almost all their revenues from advertising and don't have any real liabilities to their customers - no real responsibilities to their customers - they aggregate viewers and sell advertisements, ads that we all know are minuses; people don't want to see their ads, particularily on their smartphones where pop-up ads of various kinds comprise 36% of bandwidth costs for your smartphone and you only intentionally click on the ads 0.03% of the time.  It's a failing model and it's worth recognizing that all the Chinese companies that are really competing with our companies (with three times the population) get 10% or something of their revenues from advertising.  They really have figured out how to collect money from customers.  That's their advantage and we better be alert to this.

Q: It sounds like these companies are starting to become dated...

A: Their free model is debauching them.  Free is not capitalism.  They really don't know how to deal with customers and whenever they have to make a decision, they decide in the end, "ah, it's easier just to give it away for free and collect more data and sell it to advertisers."  This model is reaching the end of the line and we're moving into life after Google!

~ George Gilder, Stansberry Research interview, 5:20 mark, October 11, 2019

Bill Bonner on George Gilder as pied piper of the 2000 dot-com bubble

Of all those who "got it," few got it as good as George Gilder.  Gilder's role in the Information Revolution was to justify the dreams of the masses.  Like Marx, Engels, or Lenin, he helped convince the lumpeninvestoriat that they could get rich without working by buying into technology they did not understand and stock in companies they did not know with money they did not have.  What was talk of gigabits of photons flying over glass fiber and multiplexing, pulsating transits other than the information revolution's answer to Marxist claptrap about dialectical materialism?  To the average investor, it was all weird and unfathomable.  But if it made him rich, why ask questions?

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day (2003), p. 17

George Gilder on the new boom based on the Internet economy (2008)

From the pits of the crash of 2000, when the Internet and the dot.com siege were famously dismissed as a barren "bubble," came Google and MySpace to rise up and take all the chips and establish a new Internet economy.  If creativity was not expected, governments could plan it and socialism would work.  But creativity is intrinsically surprising and the source of all real profit and growth.

Because the U.S. remains the world's largest economy and still leads the world in business and technological creativity, the current crisis is mostly confined to boondoggles in finance.  It will pass rapidly and evolve into a new boom.  Emerging is a parallel unregulated financial system based on entrepreneurial creativity and invention.

At the heart of this multitrillion-dollar engine of growth are 741 venture capital firms that traffic in creativity as a business.  These firms command $257 billion under management and have launched companies generating $2 trillion in revenues.

~ George Gilder, "The Coming Creativity Boom," Forbes, November 10, 2008

George Gilder on economic conflict

The crucial conflict in every economy... goes on.  It is not between rich and poor, Main Street and Wall Street, or even government and the private sector.  It is between the established system and the new forms of wealth rising up to displace it - all the entrenched knowledge of the past and the insurrections of futuristic enterprise and invention.

~ George Gilder, "The Coming Creativity Boom," Forbes, November 10, 2008

George Gilder on economic achievement

In explaining economic achievement, academics are inclined to exalt government bodies dominated by intellectuals.

~ George Gilder, Microcosm (1989)