One of the safest bets in the corporate world is that a splashy acquisition will end up disappointing. You won’t make money every time you take that bet — Google’s purchase of Android sure paid off, for instance — but the successes are more than balanced by disasters like the merger of AOL and Time Warner, which famously lost more than 80% of its combined market cap over a decade, or News Corp buying MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and selling it in 2011 for $35 million.