There's a scene in Margin Call where the bank's CEO, played by Jeremy Irons, looks at his directors and says: "There are three ways to make a living in this business — be first, be smarter, or cheat."
The global M&A market chose door number one. Everybody wants to be first. Everybody wants to close the deal before the next guy. And the result? An all-time record of $4.9 trillion in deals closed in 2025, according to PitchBook. It even topped the 2021 peak — you know, that year when money was cheaper than tap water.
And the market's betting 2026 will be more of the same.
Corporate FOMO Has Entered the Chat
A Bain & Company survey of 300 M&A executives showed that 80% plan to maintain or ramp up the pace of dealmaking this year. Goldman Sachs, which topped the global M&A league tables last year — advising on nearly 40 deals worth a combined $1.48 trillion — heard from its 600 corporate clients that "scale and strategic growth" are the engines behind these decisions.
Jake Henry, global co-lead of McKinsey's M&A practice, summed up the mood with surgical precision: "When the sharp shifts in trade policy settled into a less threatening pattern, relief turned into confidence — and confidence turned into fear of missing out."
Read that? Read it again.
It's corporate FOMO, my friend. The exact same psychological mechanism that made your brother-in-law buy Dogecoin at the top is now running the boardrooms of the world's biggest companies. Except instead of memecoins, we're talking billion-dollar acquisitions.
Artificial Intelligence as the Perfect Excuse
Everybody needs a narrative to justify the fat check. And the narrative du jour is AI.
Companies are reshuffling, reassessing portfolios, buying tech startups and competitors — all in the name of "digital transformation" and "technological disruption." Suzanne Kumar, Bain's executive VP of M&A, said that "companies urgently need to reinvent themselves to get ahead of the major forces of technological disruption, post-globalization economics, and shifting profit pools."
Looks great on a PowerPoint. In practice, most hype-driven acquisitions end up like those dot-com era mergers: massive write-offs, layoffs galore, and a CEO apologizing on a conference call.
I'm not saying AI doesn't matter. It matters a hell of a lot. But there's a difference between buying a company because it genuinely complements your strategy and buying one because your board is terrified of looking outdated in the next annual report.
The Elephant in the Room: The Cash Is Drying Up
And here's the part nobody wants to put in the headline.
The share of capital allocated to M&A hit a 30-year low in 2025, according to Bain itself. Companies are burning through cash on dividends, share buybacks, capex, and R&D. There's less and less discretionary money left to do deals.
Think about that: deal volume hit an all-time high, but the cash available to fund them hit rock bottom. That's like throwing a rager on a maxed-out credit card.
The Boston Consulting Group's M&A Sentiment Index climbed to 75 — but it's still well below the historical average of 100. Translation: the optimism is there, but it's jittery. Sweaty palms and all.
What This Actually Means
Executives are going to need to be surgical. The days of "buy first, think later" are over — at least for anyone who still has their head screwed on straight. With scarce capital and a cost of debt that, despite central bank rate cuts, hasn't returned to 2020-2021 levels, every acquisition needs to actually pay for itself.
The winners will be those who buy with sniper discipline, not a spray-and-pray mentality.
The losers? They'll be the ones who caved to FOMO, overpaid, and two years from now will be explaining to the market why that "strategic" AI acquisition didn't generate a single cent of synergy.
Goldman Sachs is making an absolute killing advising on these deals. They win either way — whether the deal works out or not. Zero skin in the game.
And you, sitting there invested in the companies making these billion-dollar acquisitions — have you checked whether management is buying real growth or buying a narrative?
Because when the tide goes out, that's when you find out who's been swimming naked.
