Broadcom's defining moves.
The defining strategic moves at Broadcom — each one explained and grounded in the record.
The Roll-Up · Pricing
Broadcom Doesn't Buy Companies. It Buys Customers Who Can't Leave.
Broadcom paid ~$84.2 billion for VMware, then raised prices as much as twelve-fold and killed perpetual licenses. It's not a diversification play - it's a metered extraction engine, and the bill is now coming due.
8 min
The Roll-Up · Adjacency Expansion
Broadcom Doesn't Buy Software Companies. It Buys Captive Customers.
Hock Tan's playbook isn't diversification - it's a toll road. Buy a product nobody can leave, cut the cost to serve it, raise the price 2x to 12x, repeat. On the VMware deal alone, infrastructure software revenue jumped 181% to $21.5 billion in one year.
8 min
The Price Lever · Pricing
Broadcom Didn't Buy VMware to Run It. It Bought VMware to Reprice It.
When Broadcom paid roughly $61 billion for VMware in 2022, it told investors it would add about $8.5 billion of EBITDA within three years. The price hikes that enraged AT&T weren't chaos. They were the plan, announced out loud, before the deal even closed.
8 min
The Money Machine · Business Model
Broadcom Doesn't Buy Companies to Build. It Buys Them to Mine.
Broadcom is read as a chipmaker that bought its way into software. It's something colder: a cash-extraction machine that acquires mission-critical monopolies, cuts to the bone, and reprices captive customers - delivering a record $31.9 billion in adjusted EBITDA in FY2024.
7 min
The Money Machine · Business Model
Broadcom Isn't a Chip Company. It's a Machine That Buys Cash Flows.
Everyone reads Broadcom as a chipmaker riding the AI wave. It isn't — $21.5 billion of its $51.6 billion in FY2024 revenue is software it bought, not silicon it invented. The real product is the deal.
8 min
The Counterfactual · Decision Forks
Broadcom Wasn't Blocked for Being Foreign. It Was Blocked for Being Cheap.
In March 2018, a U.S. president killed a $117 billion deal before the merger agreement was even signed. The official story is national security. The real one: CFIUS decided that cutting Qualcomm's 5G R&D budget was itself a threat to America.
7 min