Top 3 Best Corporate Acquisitions Of All Time $$$
STORY TIME! Companies have fat stacks of cash, ever wondered what their best investments were? Well, you came to the right place. Here I’ll show you the backstory, the big decisions and EVEN BIGGER profits.
#3. Red TV Bought By Big GOGGLE
Yep YouTube being bought by Google. On the 13th November 2006, Google made an absolute gamer move when they decided to buy out YouTube when it was still young and fresh for $1.65 billion.
In fact, they bought YouTube for so much that a Yahoo Exec had pompously and assuredly stated that they had paid more than YouTube was actually worth. For a company that is now by far one of the biggest platforms on the internet, some could say it IS the internet for many, YouTube is the cornerstone, the definition of VIDEO ON THE INTERNET. I mean, the rights to the most famous songs ever made, Gangnam Style. Despacito…..Baby Shark!? YouTube was and is the beginning and end of all trends, hits and modern culture as we know it. That cannot be put on a price tag. But….
So far there hasn’t been any competition that has come close to even reaching the same league as YouTube and with a market capitalisation of $500 Billion, Google has made more than 300x return on their ‘grossly overpaid’ buyout. A few years after that curt comment by that Yahoo Executive, Yahoo finally kicked the bucket and is living day in and day out as a site plastered with ads in order to pay their landlord, Google, whose search screen is cleaner than Jeff Bezos’ head. How the turns have tabled.
#2. Camera Picked Up By META
Yep Instagram got snagged in by good ol’ corporate Facebook. For get this…only $1 Billion. I know you might be like, “$1 Billion, that’s a heck load of money!” And you’re right but that’s to us, companies operate on a completely different metric. Dastardly high amounts of money can seem like pocket change and this purchase was indeed a very VERY good deal.
Now it’s worth around $200-$300 Billion and for good reason. Instagram is one of the most dominant and influential social media platform in the modern era.
To provide a little more clarity I’ll show a bit of contrast.
Let me put it in simple terms, if you want to advertise online you can do it in two ways, you go to Google (You advertise on search/web) or you go to Facebook (social). Now around the same time, Amazon bought Twitch for $1 Billion as well. Twitch if you don’t know is a livestreaming service, imagine YouTube but in real time, mainly for gaming, just chatting and other varieties available. Now 2 companies both made acquisitions around the same time for $ 1 Billion, Amazon bought Twitch and Facebook bought Instagram.
Present day, 6 years down the track in 2021, Instagram is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is arguably the biggest social platform in the world, has had MASSIVE growth and makes a TON of money. Twitch however is still losing money to this day, has sniper dots aimed at their head and lawsuits that they still have to get out of the mail from millions of record companies.
#1. Apple Buys Next
This isn’t any funky spin on a company, there really is a company called Next, Apple does buy it and it turns out to be one of the GREATEST buyouts the world has ever seen and by far the greatest buyout that Apple has done to this day.
Now what is Next? I can hear you all asking. Well, in order to tell the whole story we have to start at the beginning, where this guy plays a pretty important role:
Now people think that Steve Jobs founded Apple and just stuck with Apple, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s what happened, Steve Jobs founded Apple and even though he is inexperienced and unlearned in many ways because he’s a kid, Apple begins to take off, goes public and is worth $1 Billion. However because he realises he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing, he runs over to Pepsi and tells the CEO of Pepsi on his morning run, “Do you want to sell cans of sugar water or do you want to change the world?” And then Steve got kicked out of Apple. Bummer. But Why?
Steve managed to get the CEO of Pepsi, John Sculley to Apple. Now mind you, John Sculley was getting paid $500,000 per year in Pepsi, which may not seem much now but was a lot back in those days. IBM and Coca-Cola were both formidable competitors on snatching big Johnno. But Apple came in and offered him $1 million a year, $500,000 in the form of a salary and $500,000 in the form of a bonus.
But it ends up that John Sculley and Steve Jobs do not get along and in due time they force Steve Jobs out of Apple in the late 80’s. Imagine offering $1 Million to get yourself fired, couldn’t be me.
Now Steve Jobs is out of a job and in his downtime he ends up buying Pixar, y’know just your average Tuesday night and it turned out to be a genius play by Mr Jobs and afterwards he starts a company called ‘Next’ which was going to compete with Apple, specifically with the making of computers. However, a big problem with most things that are done by Steve Jobs, it was too expensive and I mean TOO EXPENSIVE. The man priced his computers as if they were made from satellite dishes. Because of this nobody wanted to buy them but they had REALLY good Operating Systems (OS).
Now companies can buy out many companies for many different reasons, perhaps they want the patent to the products that the company makes, they want to remove competition from the market, but sometimes there comes a case where a company buys another company for the staff or the TALENT that the other company possesses. This is generally known as an ‘Acqui-hire’ (in case you want to know).
Apple decided to spend $429 Million to acquire Next and got Steve Jobs back into the company and made him ‘interim CEO’ and many articles from that time made comments on this, stating that ‘Steve Jobs is going to be the Interim CEO, but we’re definitely getting a new CEO!’ As you all know that wasn’t the case, but boy was Steve Jobs infamous back in those days. Heck even now. Everyone made comments that he was going to hold down the fort for a little while and he ended up holding the fort until he died. Once he got back in he never let go.
Around 97' was when Apple acquired ‘Next’ and brought Steve Jobs back and made him CEO and he dies on the 5th October 2011. Now because the scale of the growth to $2 Trillion is so high, you cannot even see it but Apple’s revenue was going down during the period where Steve Jobs was kicked out. It was on the verge of death, about to kick the bucket from its terrible performance during that period which gives even more credit for when Steve Jobs came back, because at that moment, Apple really and truly turned around, came back and climbed up to the top. So in the end, Apple spent $400 Million to become a $2 Trillion company through acquiring Steve Jobs again, ‘Next’ and a new and better operating system (OS).
Thank you for reading,
BTW (Steve Jobs received 138 million shares of Disney upon selling Pixar in 2007. His Apple stake was worth $2 Billion and I’ll let you calculate how much is Disney stake is worth now. Hint: It’s more than he’ll ever need!)
Also if you’ve read the whole way and want to show that you liked what you read, chuck a clap and comment below.
Following me would mean a lot to me since it shows that the content I make is meaningful to you all and since I’m on the road to 100, being the first 100 followers would mean extra more for me.
Let me know if you want to see more of this by making a comment below. I have many more cool stories where that came from in case you are interested.
Cheers,
Joseph Basu
