[throwaway823882]

Mergers & Acquisitions are a foundational part of building any major conglomerate or corporation. Every industry does it. Energy, Media, Technology, Healthcare, Finance, Food, Clothing, whatever. Big Anything can be measured by this, but the sheer number of them does not mean as much as how much of the market they suck up through each one.

The unstated end goal of every capitalist organization is to become a monopoly. Do people just not want to acknowledge this? Because that's kind of what every decision of competing corporations is always leading towards. You can't gain infinite capital unless you are always absorbing or eliminating more of the competition. The whole point of competition is not co-existence, it's domination.