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 AndroidRoughly $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.
Comments
Roughly $1bn in 2012 bought a photo app with no revenue, and the YouTube cheque sits on the same shortlist: https://youpick.best/articles/tiktok-vs-instagram-ranked https://youpick.best/articles/google-ranked-many-ways
