So, was the Cruise acquisition for the talent or the tech? How many other "Hard Tech" startups have had successful exits, when compared to how many have failed? How does this ratio compare to software startups?
It has to be the tech or tech + talent. Are there enough people worth $1 billion or more to do only a talent acquisition?
Do you have any data showing acqui-hiring of $1 billion or more? I've never heard of such an amount and retention after an acquisition is really, really hard. Seems crazy to spend so much only to have people leave after 1-2 years (or less depending on the company).
Uber, Apple, Tesla, and every car company would be interested.
You're buying both a base platform / proof of concept+ implementation and the key individuals responsible for creating it. Then training your people on the platform with the deeper knowledge from the key individuals in the 1-2 years you've got them employed.
If you can buy a breakthrough and enough knowledge transfer to get your people operational on adapting it, it's worth it even if you don't get any additional breakthroughs?
While the founders and first few employees may leave after an acquisition, preferring to work for themselves, everyone after that is an employee and, as long as they are managed and compensated well, will generally not care so much who the company's owner is.
Although the "technology" more or less worked, it was discarded and re-written or substantially changed.
In the case of Google, I'm thinking of AdMob.
In the case of Yahoo, I'm thinking of the 2-sided ad exchange network they bought and then ripped out the 2-sided features.
I think this is pretty similar to the Monsanto acquisition of Climate Corporation (where I worked) several years ago.
If you're a big traditional company, building an innovative technology team from scratch is really hard, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money on it. It takes a lot of time and effort, and you probably don't have the internal leaders or culture to attract top talent.
Buying a promising startup and continuing to operate it as an independent organization is a straightforward (if expensive) way to solve this bootstrapping problem. From a strategic perspective, it can make complete sense if the opportunity cost of getting a product to market a year or two late can be measured in billions of dollars. There are a lot of advantages to being first to market.
Relative to a company like Google, their weakness may be on the hardware side, but GM likely has access to very strong mechanical engineers, and they certainly now have the funds to go out and hire more folks.