What you describe is the "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

What you describe is the "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish This is well known and I think it would be really hard to pull off the same trick again.