$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose.
Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.
Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.