My learned experience with mergers/acquisitions is that it is a genuine skill to pull them off correctly. In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it

My learned experience with mergers/acquisitions is that it is a genuine skill to pull them off correctly. In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it, IIRC the bandwidth bills and legal threats were getting pretty existential around the time of the purchase. Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time. Being able to pull off being the only company to successfully do self-driving is a similarly masterful execution and I'm not sure how long it's going to take for competitors to catch up to them at this point. More likely they'll just be licensing any tech/patent use to competitors and taking a cut off of that too. Google has screwed up plenty of projects but this isn't one of them. The upsides to human mobility are substantial and well worth the effort and I hope everyone involved is ultimately rewarded for it.