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Isn't this akin to asking why Google and Apple end up acquiring companies at very high prices if they could just hire the founders and have them build the products in-house?


Google absolutely “poach” promising startup devs tbh.


Poaching founders is an entirely different kettle of fish than just poaching line employees.


Oh, I thought finding these vulns was a highly open-ended endeavor with variable payouts.


It depends. Some companies that buy exploits have public “price lists” for acquisitions.

100k+ for a Safari on iOS code exec, another 200k for the Safari sandbox escape, then another 500k+ for the kernel exploit?

A full chain is real money. Especially when they resell this ability for 1-2M+ per user.




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