But companies should be able to pull things like this. If a company isn't paying market rate I see no problem with a competitor destroying it by hiring away all its best employees.

If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem.

In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

There was no world where Windsurf was going to challenge Google and the same is true for the examples.

These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.

Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.

> These were regular old job offers.

They were not.

> Google didn’t want the “assets”.

They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.