"The notion of "economies of scale"--that companies save money when they become large, hence more efficient--is often, apparently behind company expansions and mergers. It is prevalent in the collective consciousness without evidence for it; in fact, the evidence would suggest the opposite. Yet, for obvious reasons, people keep doing these mergers--they are not good for companies, they are good for Wall Street bonuses; a company getting larger is good for the CEO. Well, I realized that as they become larger, companies appear to be more "efficient," but they are also much more vulnerable to outside contingencies, those contingencies commonly known as "Black Swans" after a book of that name."