but where does the money come from? it seems like a good way to avoid regulatory scrutiny if your acquisition goal is to simply exit a competitor from the market.
The money comes from investors. Private Equity basically works by taking money from investors to buy companies and turn a profit with them, paying back the investors when they do so (it's a very illiquid and risky investment, so the advertised returns tend to be higher, but it does seem like a lot of firms are struggling to actually make it work).
Aye - it’s a simple business model, which seemed to work well in an era of low interest rates. However some of these tech buyouts seem quite myopic, making it almost appear like the goal was to shutdown the company.
You really seem to want to believe Bending Spoons buys companies just to shut them down, for reasons that are not entirely clear unless you believe that they're owned by a secret conspiracy made out of note-taking, file transfer and video hosting companies that is willing to engage in a multi decade plot to very slowly buy out competitors. They then shut down the acquired businesses for no clear benefit, even though they're still profitable and new competitors could easily start up. So this conspiracy (if it exists) would be very slow and not very effective in keeping down competitors, especially compared to all the other things the conspiring companies could be doing.
Each individual company Bending Spoons acquires has a limited lifespan, so if you only look at a single deal it can indeed look myopic. But the whole point of their business model is that they use the cash flow thrown off by the acquired businesses (which are much more profitable for a short while due to firing 75% of personnel) to fund the next acquisitions. This can keep going on indefinitely, or at least until there are no more businesses to acquire.
