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- Adobe's $20 billion blunder can’t be photoshopped out
Adobe's $20 billion blunder can’t be photoshopped out
Answers for Globle, Metazooa, Chronogram and more from Dec 1 - Dec 7
Abe Train
December 08, 2025
Coming to your inbox every Monday with a brand new fun-fact and all the answers to Trainwreck Labs games from the past week.
This week, we have…
New game launch!!! 📈🚀
A fun fact inspired by Stocktangle
Answers to last week's games
Reader survey
NEW GAME ALERT! 📈 🚀
Attention all day traders and WSB lurkers! Studies have shown that actively picking stocks is an almost guaranteed way to lose money, but that's never stopped anybody.
This game will not teach you how to day trade or help you find the next GME short squeeze, but hopefully it will teach you a bit about how the market works, which stocks are important, and maybe even some macroeconomics.
Stocktangle officially goes live today. Play now!
Adobe's $20 billion blunder can’t be photoshopped out
If only the Star Wars sequel trilogy had been about duelling user interface applications instead of procedural politics, it might have fetched a higher price.
You've probably heard of Photoshop. The company behind it, Adobe (Stocktangle stock #2), also makes Illustrator, Acrobat, and dozens of other creative tools used by designers worldwide. In 2022, they announced plans to acquire Figma, a collaborative design platform beloved by remote teams and tech companies, for a staggering $20 billion. To put that number in perspective, Disney bought Lucasfilm and the entire Star Wars universe for just $4 billion back in 2012. Adobe was willing to pay nearly five times the price of Star Wars for a design tool!
Figma lets multiple designers work together in real-time on the same project, and it had been eating into the market share of Adobe's own tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Rather than compete, Adobe decided to buy.
But regulators, not just in the US but also in the UK and EU, weren't having it. After 15 months of antitrust scrutiny, both sides walked away in December 2023, with authorities worried the deal would crush competition in the design software space. Because the deal fell apart, Adobe had to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee. Not a bad consolation prize.
The kicker? Figma went public in 2025 and its valuation briefly soared to nearly $68 billion. That means Adobe's "failed" $20 billion offer would have been an absolute steal in hindsight. Instead, they're out a billion dollars with nothing to show for it.
Sometimes the deals that don't happen are just as fascinating as the ones that do.
Learn more: The Guardian
Trivia
Which feature of Photoshop used to be included that now requires a monthly subscritpion as of 2023? |
Answers to last week's games
Monday, December 1 to Sunday, December 7.
Globle
| Globle: Capitals
|
Chronogram
| Fictogram
|
Metazooa
| Metaflora
|
Linxicon
The following are the shortest paths from last week:
#658 pretty → attractive → young → twenty
#659 totally → whole → clean → computer
#660 floor → body → mind → bothered → bother
#661 variable → quantity → lot → most
#662 judgment → judicial → extrajudicial → extra → add
#663 young → younger → lesser → additional
#664 shout → loud → very → slightly
#665 Play now!
Elemingle
| Stocktangle
|
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
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