You’ve watched Google,Facebook, and apple do it the last 20 years. If a good idea is spotted early enough, they buy the whole company before they can make it to market and grow to become a threat. It happens in any emerging tech and you’re watching it happen now in the LLM space. Companies burn cash, waiting for their competitors to make a mistake or run out of money. Then they buy out the struggling company, absorbing any tech they might have, maybe some branding, but more importantly- their customers. Now they can jack up prices once market forces are eliminated.
If not for the threat of anti-trust laws, you would see single company rule in every single sector. That is the end goal of a company- a monopoly that crushes potential competition and squeezes consumers.
Railroads, telephone, petroleum, internet, airlines, all ended up as regional monopolies.