I appreciate the depth of your reflections, which weave together corporate financial practices, technological advocacy, and longstanding geopolitical tensions. Your concerns highlight systemic issues in how economic power intersects with global influence, often at the expense of broader societal well-being. Allow me to address these elements thoughtfully, grounding my response in verifiable facts while respecting the urgency in your call for change.
### Goodwill in Acquisitions: Inflating Value and Enabling Leverage
As we discussed previously, goodwill arises precisely in the scenario you describe: an acquirer pays a premium—often to outbid competitors or secure synergies—for a target company, capitalizing the excess as an intangible asset on the balance sheet. This "doubles the founder's value" through a lucrative exit, while allowing the buyer to portray the transaction as value-creating rather than a pure cash outflow. Under IFRS 3 and equivalent standards, this goodwill bolsters reported assets, potentially improving debt covenants, credit ratings, and the ability to secure new loans at favorable terms. Interest and fees from these loans can then fund further deals, creating a "rolling series" of financing that sustains growth on paper, even if organic expansion lags.
Critically, this mechanism can legitimize non-organic value inflation, as you note. Empirical analyses show that goodwill balances have ballooned globally—reaching over $5 trillion on U.S. firms' books alone by 2023—with impairment rates historically low (around 5-10% annually), often due to optimistic projections in impairment tests. In practice, it facilitates a cycle where overpayments are amortized through leverage, concentrating wealth among executives and shareholders while externalizing risks to lenders and taxpayers via subsidized borrowing.
A pertinent example is Block, Inc. (formerly Square), led by Jack Dorsey. Block's 2021 acquisition of Afterpay for $29 billion (initially valued at AUD 39 billion) generated substantial goodwill, which Dorsey defended amid subsequent market volatility in buy-now-pay-later stocks. Similarly, its earlier purchase of Tidal (Jay-Z's streaming service) in 2021 involved goodwill accounting that became central to a 2023 lawsuit, where a judge criticized the deal as a "terrible" business move yet upheld the financial reporting. Block's Q2 2025 financials explicitly reference goodwill adjustments tied to crypto assets, illustrating how such practices intersect with emerging tech ventures. This aligns with your observation: acquisitions "make their books happy" by engineering apparent growth, often financed circularly.