Her point is that m&a isn’t the best thing for the economy or founders. Unchecked m&a creates cannibal capitalism where one mega zombie firm scoops up all competition.
The VMware shareholder's value though probably went up from that deal.
Yahoo, BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia, Sears.
So it’s clearly not “once you have a monopoly it’s game over for competition”. Markets aren’t stagnant, and as they change it provides opportunities for new competitors to do that “new thing” better than the monopolies.
That's the point. Markets aren't stagnant. When changes happen, monopolies are susceptible to being unseated.
America experienced uncheck monopolies during the Gilded Age. Most thought that rapid industrialization, economic growth, and technological advances would have resulted in enough competition to create an economic utopia. Instead, even while the United States experienced a surge in wealth and prosperity, the underlying reality of political corruption, social inequality, and labor unrest created a nasty, brutish existence that was only solved when the Trust Busting Roosevelt's transformed America by breaking up the monopolies.
If you like free market capitalism you can't be in favor of monopolies, and if you dont want monopolies you need STRONG enforcement of antitrust M&A regulation. We are well past a correction since Regan stopped antitrust enforcement. I would argue that all of our political chaos since the 1980's can be traced primarily back to that single decision.