The death of iRobot
According to Google, Matt Stoller is a prominent American writer, researcher and anti-monopoly advocate, known for his work at the American Economic Liberties Project and his popular Substack newsletter, BIG, which focuses on market power, antitrust and the war on monopolies. He is a former policy advisor and a key figure in the modern anti-monopoly movement. He advocates breaking up big companies and promoting competition, drawing support from across the political spectrum.
Stoller wrote a brilliant piece on the December 2025 bankruptcy of iRobot, now known as the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner but once the builder of the PackBot – which helped sift through the rubble after September 11 and helped US troops clear mines in Iraq and Afghanistan – as well as the robotic technology deployed on the Mars rover, at the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown and underwater after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Under a court-supervised restructuring, the company will be sold to its main manufacturing partner and creditor, Chinese firm Shenzhen Picea Robotics. With 202 million iRobots in use, concerns have been raised that private home data is being transferred to the Chinese.
Critics have been quick to blame antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration for this outcome, but Stoller says a deeper look reveals a decade-long pattern of financial extraction by Wall Street that traded American innovation for short-term profits.
Following the bankruptcy, former iRobot CEO Colin Angle and several Wall Street commentators (including former Obama economist Jason Furman) argued that the collapse was a direct result of the Federal Trade Comission (FTC) and the European Union (EU) blocking Amazon’s 2022 bid to acquire the company. They argue that by preventing the merger, regulators have effectively “forced” iRobot into the hands of Chinese owners, creating a national security and consumer privacy nightmare.
However, Stoller argues that iRobot’s fate was not sealed in 2022, but much earlier, in the mid-2010s. Originally, iRobot was a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded defense robot innovator. Activist investors like Red Mountain Capital forced iRobot to abandon its “asset-heavy” and cash-flow-hungry research and defense divisions.
The ‘Asset-Light’ strategy that investors proposed demanded that iRobot stop ‘wasting’ money on research and development (R&D) and instead focus on branding, consumer vacuums and stock buybacks.
By also demanding that iRobot move production to China and Malaysia in pursuit of higher margins, investors forced iRobot, perhaps unknowingly, to effectively train its future competitors, allowing those Chinese companies to adopt the technology that iRobot had developed.
Stoller argues that Amazon’s proposed $1.7 billion acquisition was not a rescue mission for American robotics; it was an attempt at data and network dominance.
Amazon sought to integrate iRobot into its ‘Sidewalk’ network – a proprietary low-bandwidth Internet Of Things (IoT) backbone – where the real value lay in the mapping data of millions of homes, which would have strengthened Amazon’s surveillance-heavy ‘Smart Home’ ecosystem. According to Stoller, Amazon would likely have kept production in China, meaning the merger would have done little to preserve U.S. industrial capacity.
Reading the story, you quickly realize that the irony of the sale to a Chinese company is that it is overseen by the very regulators (like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) who stand up for “national security.” This suggests that antitrust outrage is often a “bad faith” argument used to protect investor payouts rather than the national interest.
I have long argued that capitalism has some very obvious flaws. It is a better model than socialism, but it has serious flaws that require proper regulation. In the case of iRobot, it is reasonable to conclude that Antitrust is one of those essential tools, but it cannot solve the problem of “extractive capitalism” – the optimization of short-term returns. As long as capitalism prioritizes high returns for financiers over long-term engineering and creation, innovative companies will continue to be stripped of their value, and perhaps ultimately sold to companies with a long-term plan.
Image source: iRobot
He is also the author of the best-selling investing guide to the stock market, Value.able – how to value and buy the best stocks for less than they are worth.
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