Yes (sort of - I can’t share the name because this was a friend’s startup and I don’t want to gossip explicitly) but this exact thing happened:
Amazon went through an acquisition process and on the day of closing, as everyone was in the room and documents were being signed, Amazon reps came back from a break in the meetings and said “Oh sorry for the delay — we’ve actually got an internal team working on this already. Our mistake. We’ll still do the deal because there’s some value here, but we’re going to lower the price by 20%. Take it or leave it.”
Amazon went through an acquisition process and on the day of closing, as everyone was in the room and documents were being signed, Amazon reps came back from a break in the meetings and said “Oh sorry for the delay — we’ve actually got an internal team working on this already. Our mistake. We’ll still do the deal because there’s some value here, but we’re going to lower the price by 20%. Take it or leave it.”
(They did the deal, but man, f-that.)