A feature of modern finance is the blockbuster leveraged buyout signed right before the market crashes: RJR Nabisco in 1989, Hilton and Harrah's in 2006. Now Twitter, in 2022.
It was incredibly risky so. And the attemot was partially driven by a feud between the Porsche and Piech branches of the Porsche family tree, with the latter "represebting" VW. All that does is show us that high stakes decisions should never be taken based on "personal" issues.
Schaeffler survived, but barely, and had Kurzarbeit not been a thing, it probably would have been a lot uglier. Kurzarbeit is a lot of why Germany came out of 2008/2009 in reasonably good shape. Better for pretty much everyone in an industry to be working 80% of the time in their current positions and getting 90% of their pay than for 20% of them to be out of work and struggling to make ends meet on unemployment - better for the workers, and better for their employers, who can turn around much more quickly when things get better.
Acquisitions become crazier and crazier as the market gets hotter and hotter, with ever increasing purchase prices - someone inevitably gets left holding the bag when the market comes crashing back down to earth, and it's often the greedier players who take bigger risks.
The blockbuster acquisitions that happen in the middle of the bull market also often seem insane in the moment, but if the market continues on the up after the fact then they're remembered as sound business decisions rather than as a symptom of mania.
There aren’t. They cluster to varying degrees depending on the thresholds one chooses. But the likelihoods are far from uniform.