My experience with mergers and acquisitions is that it's akin to keeping a warm body on life support. When I worked at a company that did a lot of M&A I was sitting around like, "Why couldn't you have just built that?" When I worked at a company that was recently acquired and went through the merger process I was like, "wow I see why you bozos would've never built this yourselves." That isn't to say there aren't companies that do them well or there aren't places where it makes sense in an ultra-competitive landscape but I'm curious - when was the last time anyone really considered tech an ultra competitive landscape?

Post-2015 other than large language models this industry has mostly been riding on intellectual property consolidation. That's basically Lina's point; nobody actually benefits from this - not customers, not share holders, not the American people. The over practice of M&A leaves a small pool of winners who are not the kind of people that post on or read this forum.