With the second Trump presidency, Lina Khan will be gone, and the Big Tech will be allowed to buy companies again. Especially with prominent VCs like David Sacks joining the administration.
https://deepnewz.com/law/lina-khan-leaves-ftc-after-winning-every-case-one-year-sparking-debate-on-anti-a0670b9a

Recent AI fundraises include

• Perplexity at $9B valuation

• Anthropic at $60B valuation

• DataBricks $62B valuation

• xAI also about $60B valuation

• ...

None of these companies have revenue that's a fraction of the money being raised, apart from DataBricks perhaps.

Are we going to see consolidation or acquisitions, now that these may not be rejected by FTC and DOJ every time?

Will Amazon or Apple buy Perplexity? Will Amazon buy Anthropic?

It's hard to imagine xAI being bought by any company, other than a merger with Tesla? That would count...

In 2024 the biggest AI acquisition was Google's very strange quasi-acquisition of Character.AI for $2.5B. OpenAI bought one smallish company...

Please suggest other companies that could possibly be acquired (and clearly for more than $1B) that should be added to this market. I asked Grok for the top 50 AI startups by reported valuation.

To quality for an acquisition... a company must be

• bought or merged into a larger entity

• acquisition price must be over $1B -- although if the price is close we will err on side of YES... $500M will not count, $900M will definitely count

• weird non-standard acquisitions count

• [for when Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired by OpenAI board, if they moved to Microsoft and took the team with them... that would have counted assuming over $1B would be issued to group hires or paid to OpenAI]

• deals announced in 2025 will count, even if not completed in the year -- or even if they are cancelled later (like NVIDIA acquisition of ARM)