Gaussian...Indeed. And its a vicious cycle. As a company's stock becomes hyped and over priced, they are more apt to over pay using their over valued stock as currency such as Nvida just did with Arm Holdings. The most outrageous example of this was when AOL's stock was so amazingly high, they were able to buy Time Warner. AOL's own goodwill at the time was 90 percent of the stock price valuation. Once AOL's goodwill vanished with the bubble, Time Warner just placed AOL in the basement as a very small subsidiary.