Big Tech companies are using licensing deals to swallow their competitors' talent and technology without ever triggering antitrust laws.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Substance Over Form: How Big Tech Licensing Agreements Are Acquisitions in Disguise
SSRN · 6640741
The Takeaway
A new strategy called the reverse acqui-hire allows giant firms to effectively buy out rivals while remaining invisible to regulators. Instead of buying the company's stock, they simply license all its intellectual property and hire its entire staff. This approach bypasses the legal requirements for a merger because no equity changes hands. It allows monopolies to eliminate competition and consolidate power without any oversight. Regulators are currently focusing on traditional buyouts while the real consolidation is happening through these legal loopholes. The world's largest companies are growing in ways that current laws are not built to stop.
From the abstract
Between March 2024 and December 2025, four of the most powerful technology companies in the world spent approximately $24 billion acquiring their competitors. None of them called it that. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia each structured their transactions as non-exclusive licensing agreements combined with mass hiring events, preserving the legal independence of each target while absorbing its founding team, its core technology, and the competitive threat it represented. The law, built arou