🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A

“I think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was not as targeted and surgical an approach was used. And as a result of that, it did have a chilling effect on M&A. And so it hurt the small tech environment. And so I think that we need to fix that part of it.”

“Then on the M&A side, if all you're doing is waiting for Lina Khan to not be there, to me, I think that that betrays what M&A is supposed to be, which is you're supposed to underwrite some industrial logic from first principles where things are very accretive and very accretive things should not hang by a thread on the emotional regulation or dysregulation of the FTC Commission.”

“So the backroom buzz is that Donnie from Queens is going to make M&A great again. Couple of reasons there, Sacks, the wrath of Lena Cohn's coming to an end, Mag-7 sitting on massive amounts of cash, and that cash is growing as people have laid people off and they're focused on getting fit.”

“I agree that her approach has been overly broad, and has had a chilling effect on M&A.”

“her theory is you got to prevent the aggregation of powers, you got to fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.”

“I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market, but it seems to be completely gone. Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen.”

“Google wants to accelerate beyond AWS. They want to become the leader and they're going to look for other sizable transactions that will pass antitrust muster.”

“On Wiz, I think the most likely explanation is that they just want to keep building this as a standalone company. I think they're probably also worried that they can't get the deal through.”

“I don't think that she should stop some of these, what I would call R&D acquisitions, from taking place where there's no accretion of market share, but rather starts being bought because they contribute a useful piece of technology. I don't think you want to shut down that part of the market. Lord knows we don't have enough exits as it is”

“we can't sell them because LinaCon is going to scuttle this M&A, and what that means is in a very real way, we have dollars being taken out of innovation in early stage”

“the right approach to antitrust is to stop anti-competitive tactics. Bundling is at the top of the list. Instead, what they've stopped is all M&A, which is actually bad for the ecosystem, because you deny risk capital reward”

“You got no M&A happening right now in tech, the real estate guys, they can't get loans because the interest rates are through the roof and there's a credit crunch.”

“It's way too early in the development of these markets to say that these are clearly monopolists. There's still a lot of competition going on.”

“I think the DOJ and the FTC are totally way out of their ski tips on this. This is a totally nascent industry.”

“We got to have a better solution for allowing companies to be bought and sold in this or merge in this country... These two things are putting a lot of headwinds on the startup ecosystem and on the venture and the risk taking capital ecosystems.”

“I think the Democrats and the Republicans are really well aligned here. They don't like deals. And I don't think you're going to see a big sea change. They hate big tech for different reasons, but they equally want to slow them down.”

“Well, look, it's going to be very hard for any big tech company to do a $50 billion acquisition of anything, just given that Linecom and the FTC are opposed to bigness in and of itself.”

“I don't think this is some run around anti-trust.”

“It's just as hard for Microsoft to get anything through at this point. So probably they're just like, why even deal with the antitrust? They don't really need the assets.”

“The other one is that antitrust authorities are blocking all of their acquisitions. And so what do you do with all that cash? ... frankly, we're not going to be able to grow through M&A because of antitrust right now anyway”

“One is they just can't get it through. We've talked about this before. The M&A window is even more closed than the IPO window, I would say.”

“We are investigating Amazon's purchase of the portable vacuum cleaner Roomba, right?”

“I think it's bad for capital markets when deals that are offered up just linger for 15, 18 months. I don't think that that's healthy. It causes a lot of pause amongst investors.”

“I think this is going to have a very chilling effect on M&A activity for not a good reason, for not a good reason.”

“or just prohibiting the merger entirely. It feels like that's what's going to happen.”