"Some high-profile acquisitions take out a rising competitor, such as Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed in 2009, some immediately expand a business's suite of offerings, such as Salesforce's 2020 purchase of Slack, and some may morph into an unrecognizable asset, like Amazon's 1999 purchase of Alexa Internet, then a web traffic-tracking website. (The first Amazon Echo marking Alexa's debut would launch in 2014.)"
"But many lower-profile tech company acquisitions are made at least in part to gain access to specialized engineering talent. So-called "acquihires" haven't traditionally raised many eyebrows. But the term's definition has been expanding as the AI arms race has accelerated a new form of tacit takeover, the "reverse-acquihire." In this move, which isn't technically an acquisition, a company either takes a minority interest in a company or makes no financial investment in it at all."
Acquihires secure specialized engineering talent through acquisitions. The AI arms race has produced "reverse-acquihires," where companies hire founders or key executives while taking no or only a minority stake. Reverse-acquihires can leave the remaining company rudderless and restrict employment or liquidity opportunities for less senior staff. The hiring firm can avoid acquisition processes, documentation and merger review, reducing regulatory oversight. The Federal Trade Commission has begun scrutinizing both reverse and traditional acquihires for potential anticompetitive abuse. Regulators are questioning whether hiring a company's leaders can be practically equivalent to buying the company.
Read at Fast Company
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