Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.

He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.