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2022: THE YEAR OF BIG TECH M&A

Mergers & Acquisitions baby. It’s like the natural selection of the corporate world; a process as old as time.

The last few years we’ve seen an absolute bonanza of of M&A activity. 2021 marked the biggest year of all-time with more than $5T in global deal closed, and despite a decline in volume to end 2022, the dealmaking train is still rolling at a record clip.

It’s basically a big game of Pac-Man — the biggest, hungriest companies gobble up the little ones to keep getting bigger. After all, why innovate internally when you have the money to buy innovation from outside? 🤷

This has become increasingly true in the world of Big Tech. Microsoft alone has bought 38 companies in the past 5 years, and others like Alphabet & Meta have been quick to follow.

But… how do we know if all this fuss is actually working? Like, aside from the sheer size of the deal, which ones seem to have had the biggest ~impact~?

A proxy for this might be the amount of news coverage a particular M&A deal gets. The thinking is that the more people are talking about the deal, the more reason it could be something worth paying attention to. 👀

So we checked it out. We looked back at all M&A coverage (articles, Tweets, blogs, SEC filings) over the past 12+ months to see which deals had the most mentions.

Here’s what we got, we made this pretty little chart for you:

Most Newsworthy Deals of 2022

The biggest acquisitions of the year were somewhat surprising to me. While the biggest deals tended to make the list, bigger ones didn’t necessarily get the most news coverage. Some major takeaways:

1) AMD’s record chipmaker buyout 🏆

The most-mentioned deal of the year was chipmaker AMD’s acquisition of fellow chipmaker Xilinx for a record $50B back in February 2022. Xilinx embeddings are already contributing significantly to AMD's top-line, accounting for roughly 25% of AMD's revenue in Q4 2022 according to

 2) Elon becomes Chief Twit 🎩

Elon Musk’s $44B Twitter takeover spectacle came out to be the 2nd-most talked-about deal of the year. I mean, how could it not? It had a bit of everything: employee walk-outs, the whole blue-check marks debacle, and of course, some God-tier memes. It was also one of the only private deals to make the top 20 most-mentioned list.

 3,4) Microsoft may have a shopping addiction 👜

The 3rd and 4th-most talked-about deals this year were both from mega Microsoft. First was its purchase of gaming company ActivisionBlizzard last January for $69B (the biggest outright acquisition of the year), and next was its $20B buyout of conversational AI company Nuance. Throw in the company’s more recent $10B investment into ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and Microsoft has spent the most on buying innovation in recent history… BY FAR.

6) Adobe buys the beloved Figma and everyone cries 😭

This one was a bit more controversial. Adobe’s $20B purchase of the collabrative design website Figma back in September sparked a lot of outcry from Figma users, worried that the notoriously shrewd Adobe could ruin (or even terminate) fan-favorite Figma to make a few extra bucks. So far, this hasn’t happend yet, but designers still seem jaded about it.

7) Amazon buys… iRobot? Hmmm 🛒

The smallest deal with the most news coverage was undoubtedly Amazon’s $2B purchase of self-driving vacuum cleaner-maker iRobot (that was fun to say). While the deal didn’t break any records, it made waves more for its symbolic implications that Amazon is becoming an all-encompassing conglomerate juggernaut. Amazon now owns something in basically every product/service category. It’s like it’s becoming the real-life version of Buy n Large from the movie Wall-E. 😂

13) Nvidia folds on its deal to buy Arm

The last one I’ll highlight here is Nvidia’s failed acquisition of fellow chip-maker Arm. In what would have been the largest chipmaker deal ever at the time ($40B in 2021), Nvidia was forced to turn back on the deal in February 2022 becasuse of the mega-regulatory hurdles in places like China that would have made the deal near-impossible. Ahhh… what could have been. AMD is smiling just thinking about this.

Anyways, that’s all for today baby. Hopefully you learned a little something… and if you didn’t, well then respond below & tell me wtf you want from me. Back tomorrow with more spicy news monitoring glory. ✌️

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

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