Bethesda are not helpless victims who can be purchased against their will, so no :) 

You can buy a company... or you can hire a bunch of developers to make games.

In either case, you will need to make back your costs by selling future games. So you need to track how much you spend very carefully. Many games companies basically only just about exist from pay check to pay check... a few just got lucky a couple of times and may (or may not) in future.

Even if EA could, they wouldn't be able to outbid MS. Amazon and Google would be the only ones, but since they lack successful gaming platforms, it would be one hell of a risk for them. MS already have the gaming infrastructures in place and brand power to make the purchase with very little risk.

Coca-Cola, Disney, Nestle or Tesla (and hundreds of other companies) also could have bought Bethesda/ZeniMax... but they didn't.

Thank fuck EA didn't.. Don't need any more political pandering in my games tyvm.

I mean... Yeah... I guess.

It's not really that scary, many of the developers being bought are barely staying afloat on their own. If anything they welcome being bought and being under a stable roof for a change. I would say it only becomes worrisome if other big publishers like Ubisoft, Square Enix, Capcom, Sega, etc.... also start getting bought out.