Why would the SEC care? Shareholders of VMWare were properly compensated, and shareholders of Broadcom should know by now that Broadcom management seeks to buy companies and ruin their products. Nothing securities fraud about that.

DOJ and FTC enforce anti-trust and are more likely to be gatekeepers fo acquisitions, but while Broadcom is big and VMWare is big... Broadcom is going to ruin the product and that's not going to increase their marketshare and market power, so what's the problem?

It's like complaining about PE buying a failing company and then it goes bankrupt 3-7 years later. PE just accelerates the path, Toys R Us was already dead.

Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.