A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.
She asked about Microsoft’s hiring of the team behind Inflection, a would-be OpenAI competitor that Hoffman co-founded. It was an acquisition in everything but name, clearly designed to avoid the scrutiny of antitrust regulators. Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired…