In addition, you take on the debt and the loan portfolio that it's responsible for.

> What would a buyer have even been purchasing in this scenario?

> A pile of code? Is it particularly hard to recreate?

I think you are buying time. Yes, code could be written, but would probably take at least a year.

Additionally, money-wise what matters is net, even if something is overpriced, all that matters in the end, can you make more than you've spent.

p.s. thanks for the interesting question to ponder and discuss

Another example industry where you can see this well is manufacturing with Protolabs, Xometry sucking wind for the last several years. Surprising, you would have thought that large amounts of capital and economies of scale would beat out competition (they were planning on grinding incumbents into the dirt by now). Are we seeing a case where innovation is not restricted to automation and software?

Incumbents are also leveraging decades (or centuries) of investment in land, people, technologies to win in some cases.

Probably patents mostly, perhaps around some novel hardware the buyer wants to utilize.

They run a freight exchange platform linking truck drivers with people who need freight shipped. What hardware patents did they have?

Nothing apparently which is (seemingly) why no one bought them.