Hey, you posted a question 2 months ago which I didnt catch. I had mentioned something about not all companies existing on some "unspoken arbitrage" and you asked what I meant.

So arbitrage is identifying either a high or low price for something, and flipping it until the price equals out to what the "market" thinks it should be. The common example is buying an item for a low price and selling it for a high price, but you can also do this for things like currency (bet countries currencies against eachother), and a lot of other things.

The obvious unspoken arbitrage I have worked on is a multinational corporation's reluctance to pay tax. At the highest level by keeping taxes from the government the companies coffers grow and the gov's do not, eventually resulting in the gov not having enough power or resources to collect their tax you do owe, further allowing you to pay less tax down the line.

Another obvious one was something like OP's case. OP identified a company that could be acquired and folded into the parent company while cutting jobs.

If you as a company identified an opportunity once 10 years ago that made you rich, but unspokenly was based on something terrible morally, you would take that opportunity and never talk about it afterward. But in your culture is a "we are willing to do this" button deep down.

Unspoken arbitrage is mostly wielding immense power to do morally questionable things for literal personal "gain". Using your team of lawywers to strong arm a smaller company into a deal thats better for you, that costs them. Stuff like that.

Another way of putting it is unspoken arbitrage is a bunch of "the cool kids" getting together to act like bullies/steal from outsiders, then denying/never EVER mentioning the things they did to get there.