Broadcom

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.

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.

Broadcom's move from chips into enterprise software looks like reinvention. It isn't. It's a repeatable financial machine — buy a mature, sticky business, cut its R&D, re-price the customers who can't leave. The U.S. government once blocked the playbook mid-swing, on a $117 billion deal, and explained exactly why.

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.

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.