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This is like the assassin who missed congratulating themselves for electing Trump. Remember, the DOJ did bankrupt Spirit Airlines by blocking its merger with JetBlue. It didn’t kill Figma, but that’s only because the founder is amazing — not because state harassment helped! https://t.co/cw3g2Bg5gs Success truly has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. Because the Figma IPO is so big that apparently even the most dedicated anti-tech haters want to get their name into the winner’s circle. But the chutzpah here is off the charts. This one reminds me of Gensler taking credit for the Bitcoin ETF, after he got forcibly dragged across the finish line by a court process. Let me explain why. (1) First, the amazing thing about tech “monopolies” is that we have so many of them. That is, we have at least seven giant US companies capable of making huge acquisitions, and easily a few dozen worldwide. So the market failure ostensibly motivating interference with M&A just isn’t there in the first place. (2) Second, if you cut off the flow of M&A, it results in fewer exits because most companies can’t make it all the way to IPO. The reason they can’t is because of Sarbox, another gift from the regulatory state that makes it hard to IPO. (3) If there are fewer exits, and exits are much more uncertain (due to the fear of random antitrust harassment!) you get weird deal structures or no deals at all. That means fewer dollars to invest in tech. (4) And that was the goal of the entire anti-techlash movement over the last decade, of which the “antitrust” stuff was a key part. Their entire goal was to kill funding for tech startups, and wokify the ones that survived. Because tech companies had disrupted Blue America’s power centers and taken away media ad revenue. (5) Finally, the sheer fact that Figma survived and made it was because of the founder and his team’s effort. To be whiplashed out of a giant acquisition is an enormous strain. To resume the climb after such a disappointment is more than all but the very best teams could handle. Anyway — Figma is one of the very best teams and managed to rally and pull out a win, despite the best efforts of anti-capitalists on multiple continents to kill their company. Ultimately, the anti-capitalists just don’t understand the concept of economic consent. Yes means yes.