I can, but I don't like to discuss past stuff. It actually does happen with tiny bios, not billion dollar deals. No one is going to spend over a billion to do that, but companies do buy small companies to own the IP and control it.
They never say it, but the entire story of that company, maybe a promising technology and story, it just disappears.
My experience is with Japanese companies buying out companies in particular. Patents are really useful, developing some random drug a company may have wished to develop with it, costs money and may not have been the strategic reason the company was bought.
But for people, doctors, patients, investors, caught up in the idea that they were solving a major health problem, it's a disappointment, but seems to be easily forgotten in the cash payment. Most people move on, as I have in those circumstances. If you made money, you made money. If management was willing to sell out, fine. And more frequently, the sale is due to trauma in the c-suite. Shorts go after key people, they end up falling into some spiral of bad press, and leave or get jettisoned, but they were a key person behind the tech. And then a sale becomes the obvious option. A large Pharma comes in, buys it saying they look forward to keeping it all going, blah blah blah, and you never hear about that technology again. They bought it for the patents, and like that Indiana Jones vignette at the end, it may or may never really get much use again as big companies are not very efficient at deploying their assets to all possible opportunities. They prioritize, and manage, and limit. But they also have patents that they can then use in a variety of ways, sometimes defensively, and sometimes to add to other things they are doing.
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