The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 could be considered the worst regulation of 21 century. It helped created behemoth corporations, where a single person can misallocate hundred of billon of dollars (Oh, hi Mark), they can buy out any competition.

Right now US economy is basically a centrally planned economy.

Reflection AI was founded in 2024. Is it really consolidation when new companies spawn out of nothing and get acquired 2 years later? That's just normal M&A churn.

what are they going to do with all the free money people are investing on them?

Back in the day, things like these were outlawed and the government tried to ensure competition in the markets:

> The major film studios owned the theaters where their motion pictures were shown, either in partnerships or outright. Thus, specific theater chains showed only the films produced by the studio that owned them. The studios created the films, had the writers, directors, producers and actors on staff (under contract), owned the film processing and laboratories, created the prints and distributed them through the theaters that they owned: In other words, the studios were vertically integrated, creating a de facto oligopoly. [...] Ultimately, this issue of the studios' then-alleged (and later upheld) illegal trade practices led to all the major movie studios being sued in 1938 by the U.S. Department of Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Nowadays it seems like "vertically integrated" is something most companies openly aim for.

Huh? new tech companies have proliferated in the US the last few years. M&A is just one side of the coin. Without an exit path -- IPO, acquisition or private credits -- there is very little appetite for new businesses.

Did you know that 151 companies were founded by SpaceX's alumni? Compare to 5 they've acquired (not including XAI)

https://www.alumnifounders.com/stats

Would you prefer these companies going bankrupt and stop existing?

I for one am excited by the prospect of a well-funded open-source competitor to Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Chinese models.