Transcript:
- Nilay Patel: I just want to point out that Microsoft fought tooth and nail to buy Activision.
- Alex Cranz: Yeah.
- Nilay: And they were like, this will grow our business. This is the thing. And really the question we should ask with all of these deals: "How many people are you going to lay off? How many is it? It's always some."
- David Pierce: Wasn't it T-Mobile that said in buying Sprint that it thought the number of jobs were going to go up? And everybody's "like, oh, sick!". And then they immediately let off thousands of people.
- Nilay: Immediately.
- Alex: Yeah. That's not true. It's never true.
- Nilay: And it's just like, it's the thing. You combine two companies, there's going to be overlap. It's gonna happen. I interview a lot of executives. You can just see the wheels turning. "Boy, I don't need double the back office staff." Whatever.
- Nilay: And they call it efficiencies, but it's really layoffs. And that's just like how it goes. And then on top of it, Microsoft was insistent that it needed to buy Activision because it was winning while Microsoft was losing. And they bought Activision. And they're like "look at all these losers." And it's like, we should start asking the questions ahead. "How many people are you going to lay off?"
- Nilay: That's the only question. Right? That is the policy consequence of allowing these mergers at scale. Like, really, truly on the ground, a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. How many is it? And if they're not willing to answer that question, I honestly think we should no longer give any of these companies the benefit of the doubt.
- Alex: Yeah. You don't get to just buy it.