Not that that never happens, but engineering time is not cheap even at Gitlab scale. Even if you manage to recreate the product based on the insider info it's s

Not that that never happens, but engineering time is not cheap even at Gitlab scale. Even if you manage to recreate the product based on the insider info it's still a risky process; new products fail all the time, especially if they are new entries in an already filled market. It's much quicker and often not that much more expensive (after you tally up all the engineering and marketing costs and adjust for the risk of failure) to acquire a company that already has a working product, customers, marketing, documentation and usually you get a team of domain experts included in the purchase.