Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.
we will see a few more acquisitions play out in this space over the next year or so but I do believe Google will have a hard time acquiring the companies in the space as tons of people are jumping ship and some are even starting their own self driving startups with prolly no intention of going back to google like Otto
