I'm not a Khan fan, like, at all, but by the time you're at the point where the FTC is getting involved in your M&A, you've crossed the threshold of success; all the signals to future startups about your path being promising have been sent.
Not everything needs to last and companies that can’t radically transform their management culture to enable innovation and competition deserve to wane until they’re in a steady-state or they go under to allow for a new competitor to rise.
Basically the random and aggressive nature of it was having a chilling effect on all M&A. Why would you go thorough the hassle of a small acquisition (as a buyer) if you knew there was a even a 10% chance that the FTC was going to take an interest?
When a huge company can easily acquire basically any small promising competitor, that is exactly what Khan (and many others of both parties) consider a problem. Chilling those sorts of deals was indeed the point.
But if the buyer was, say, the 312th largest tech company in the U.S., the chance of FTC intervention was essentially zero. If buyers in mid-size range were pointing at Khan to explain an M&A slow-down, I personally would not take them at their word.
Maybe, but it doesn't take a lot of scrutiny to scare the crap out of you if you're a major player in some niche industry with a few hundred million in ARR. Which is most public companies.
That's the perverse thing about this stuff: the biggest players are probably the least sensitive to the regulatory burden.
This "scare" characterization isn't how anybody thinks in reality. Everything is a cost benefit analysis, the risk that you'll come under FTC scrutiny is going to be a factor weighed against the potential gains of the acquisition. Companies understand their own place in the market relative to their size and dominance, the overwhelming majority of companies know they basically have nothing to fear from the FTC ever.
It is precisely the companies that have lost the internal capacity to innovate (Meta) that have the most to lose and the companies that were going extremely well already (Instagram had a bunch of suitors and could have chosen to punch out later in the process, I heard this from Krieger in person) who have the most to gain.
The losers here are people who can buy and hold FAANG as a basket and just sit back and let the market transfer all wealth to pensioners. The winners are founders, employees, new startups, consumers, cities with more offices in them, that's a partial list.
Instagram was bought for $1B. Whether they had 13 or 1300 employees, a $1B acquisition isn’t small in an anti-trust sense.
Because the shares were sold to the public and now trade at three times what the absolute ceiling on their value would have been, and because everything from early options to later stage RSU equity comp structures will now convert at the full market valuation, the preference ladder and ratchets and all the other ways you can get Windsurf'd as an early employee (sometimes even a founder!) don't kick in, so the rank-and-file equity holder is rich now too.
Future founders now have another well-heeled public suitor.
If you even remotely believe in Hacker News style "tech startups make people rich and this is good" stuff, then this is a grand-slam home run win by any measure.
Maybe time to re-evaluate what you think of Lina Khan's policy agenda in light of data on the outcomes? It's of course possible there is some other data point you have in mind where it went poorly and you keep your opinion. But if that opinion was of the bland "regulation is bad for tech startup people trying to get rich" variety, seems maybe time for a re-think?
Edit: Within, not Withings