What is the best tech acquisition of all time?
Billion-dollar bets that look obvious now and looked reckless at the time.
1Google buys YouTube
$1.65bn in stock in 2006 for a video site that had existed for 20 months.
2Facebook buys Instagram
$1bn in 2012 for a photo app with 13 employees and no revenue.
3Google buys Android
Roughly $50m in 2005 for the operating system now on most phones alive.
4Apple buys NeXT
$429m in 1996, which brought back Steve Jobs and the basis of macOS.
5Facebook buys WhatsApp
$19bn in 2014 for a messaging app with 55 employees.
6Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard
$68.7bn closed in 2023, the largest deal in gaming history.
7Microsoft buys GitHub
$7.5bn in 2018 for the place most of the world's code lives.
8Microsoft buys LinkedIn
$26.2bn in 2016 for the professional network and its data.
9Disney buys Pixar
$7.4bn in 2006, which handed Disney back its animation department.
10Disney buys Marvel
$4bn in 2009 for a character library that has since made many times that.
11Amazon buys Twitch
$970m in 2014 for the platform where games are watched, not played.
12Amazon buys Whole Foods
$13.7bn in 2017, which put Amazon into physical grocery overnight.
13Apple buys Beats
$3bn in 2014 for headphones and the streaming service that became Apple Music.
14IBM buys Red Hat
$34bn in 2019, a bet that enterprise software would run on open source.
15Nvidia buys Mellanox
$6.9bn in 2020 for the networking that now wires AI data centres together.
16Elon Musk buys Twitter
$44bn in 2022, later written down by a large fraction of that.
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