The way I see it is maybe more broad. Tech companies no longer see startups as threats anymore (except for AI). The reasons for this involve the aforementioned

The way I see it is maybe more broad. Tech companies no longer see startups as threats anymore (except for AI). The reasons for this involve the aforementioned tax changes, the loss of ZIRP, AI, offshoring, etc., but also include a whole host of legal and regulatory hurdles. The upshot is that Facebook/Amazon/Google are no longer threatened by (non-AI) competitors because they know that unless you come into the ecosystem with literal billions of dollars and an army of lawyers (or the backing of a large foreign government), they can crush you one vaguely worded regulation at a time, and if they can’t, they can get the current administration to ban you. AI has largely been excepted because the law isn’t settled yet, so it’s still possible for (eg. )Google to be threatened by a smaller competitor.