There is nothing wrong with acquisitions. It's one way big companies rejuvenate, and startups get a liquidity event. And if it's not an acquihire, the product can get broader distribution. Some companies are started to be acquired; their product of value mostly to big companies.
Why not let big companies die and be replaced by startups if the only way they can succeed is by [ab]using their incumbent position to “rejuvenate” (a euphemism if ever I saw one!)?
It would stop worse products winning as a result of resources gained through prior successes (and monopolistic practices).
In fact, I’d be happy to see a situation where sufficiently unrelated businesses have to be sold off after some grace period even if they were developed in house.
That's some euphemistic way of saying that monopolies can get even bigger without even any pretense of competition. We all know where this ends. The monopolists win big and consumers will have to suck it up.
No, it means the company can succeed and the service they built has a chance to continue. The choice isn't "be acquired or enter a Nirvana" it's often "be acquired or die".
Yes, and we need a lot more death in the tech company space. The problem is we have a lot of companies that are just bad, stupid ideas that are allowed to survive because they're on life support. We just dump hundreds of millions in marketings to cover up the shit product. And then we purposefully operate at a loss to flood the market, aka defrauding consumers, to cover up the shit product.
And then, like 12 years later, after our anti-competitive practices have paid off and we have 90% market share, we jump our prices 200% and drop our quality as we enter our robber baron business strategy.
All of this, because the shit company didn't die when it's time came. Instead, like a zombie, it now feeds on the brains of consumers that have no where else to turn.
It's not bizarre, it's pretty much in line with the stance that the West has had with Russia since the 90s, even with Bush junior in the early 2000s, before the rise of the neocons.
This is the kind of crap we learned about when studying the "Robber Baron" era in the US public school system. Well, I mean, we were _supposed_ to learn it - evidently a lot of folks did not.
Inspiration for why to stay in school so that you too could become a robber baron. Like all history, learn the previous failings so that you can avoid them.
Thank you, that's a very fair point, and I apologize for my *-centric" viewpoint and such a short quip. That is not what we're aiming for in conversation on this site.
I took a giant shortcut, without providing sources, that was meant to indicate that we are in a situation that closely resembles the "Gilded Age" or "Robber Baron" era in the United States.
I was intending to point towards the actions of individuals in the analogous position of those "Robber Barons", in particular here, Elon Musk.
This dude used the data from Twitter, fed it to xAI (xAI spent lots of CapEx from investment on GPUs). Mix mid-"AI" training on such a ridiculously valuable dataset for free == cool models. Cool models + data stream of Doomscrolling == Higher valuation.
This just seems like a "nepo-baby" hit it big on some meme coin and bailed out Daddy.
Elon Musk is, essentially, bailing out himself using investor money from another company he runs by assigning a very highball evaluation to the company he's been destroying.
I don't know how you can get closer to the robber baron ideal than being able to distort the market like that.
It _should_ go without saying, but I'm glad you got here first and made sure it WAS said.
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