Microsoft last bought LinkedIn - for $22b in cash and stock, that one acquisition is really expensive and definitely not “midcap.” NVIDIA got ARM for $12b cash, $21.5b stock. Also huge.
Facebook is really interesting in this regard because its multi billion acquisitions - Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus - all had finance people saying they overpaid. Maybe they did overpay! In the sense that if those companies SPAC’d instead, the price the vehicle would pay would be lower - not in some subjective sense if those were or were not good acquisitions, they obviously were.
So if I had the opportunity to bid against Facebook for Instagram or against PayPal for Honey, I would! SPACs let me do that. The curious thing is that Facebook isn’t bidding on those companies anymore - Snap said no and TikTok isn’t possible - so... does that mean Instagram would have been cheaper? That would have been an amazing opportunity.
Otherwise we’re talking about smaller acquisitions. For example, Apple bought a lot of companies that probably chose acquisition because they would have been microcap IPOs and thus not tradable by Robinhood users - and maybe that’s really the flip side of this.
But I don't think this has anything to do with cash piles at large cap firms.
One reason SPACs work is that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft are sitting on huge cash piles and not doing acquisitions. For almost a decade. So of course high quality mid-caps are going to be "cheap." So while I appreciate your appeal to stuff that isn't fundamentals, it seems like the imbalance between supply of midcaps and demand for acquiring them would be an opportunity.