Tag: acquisition

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Stocks Technology

Elon Musk agrees to buy Twitter

Major day for Twitter shareholders, Elon Musk agrees to purchase Twitter at the premium price of $54.20.

Twitter shares surge 22% after Elon Musk revives deal to buy company at original price

Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed course and agreed to buy Twitter for the agreed upon price, according to a filing on Tuesday.

The social media company issued a statement saying it had received the letter and said, “The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”

Source: CNBC

I wonder what changed his mind.

Categories
Stocks Technology

Adobe acquires Figma

I see this as Adobe is fading into irrelevance with product engineers. Today hardly almost all designers I know of are using Figma.

Smart defensive play there Adobe.

Adobe makes $20B bet on a collaborative future with Figma acquisition

Prior to announcing its intent to buy Figma for $20 billion on Thursday, Adobe’s largest deal was its $4.75 billion Marketo acquisition in 2018.

Perhaps Adobe saw the Figma deal as its organization-altering moment as it watched the creative market making a key change from one centered on creating assets with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to one firmly focused on the creators themselves and the collaborative nature of the design process.

The former is where Adobe has built the bulk of its business. The latter is represented by Figma, a startup with visionary founders who wanted to change the way people thought about design in a digital context, a change so important that the old-guard company was willing to overspend to grab the young upstart and bring the two ways of thinking together.

Source: Techcrunch

Well, good luck. $20B is way higher than I imagine.

Figma is used by Airbnb, Uber and Zoom.

Categories
Stocks Technology

PayPal is exploring Pinterest acquisition

San Jose, California-based PayPal has recently approached Pinterest about a potential deal, the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private. The companies have discussed a potential price of around $70 a share, the people said.

Bloomberg

Pinterest suffered user decline in the last year and I don’t think their management knows how to fix the problem. I highly doubt PayPal would much to help on Pinterest user decline. To me, Pinterest users are a niche market of designers and collectors. I thought it would be easy for Pinterest to create a vibrant marketplace with the user personas they have. I guess it’s just too niched.

Pinterest stocks jumped about 14% today.

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Stocks

Facebook fined $69.6 million in the UK for Giphy takeover

After Facebook acquired the popular GIF repository Giphy (reportedly for $400 million), the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation to determine if the merger would lessen competition. As part of that probe, it said Facebook couldn’t continue with activities related to the merger (integrating products, merging teams and so on) without prior approval from the CMA. 

Now, the CMA has announced that it has fined Facebook £50.5 million ($70 million) for breaching those enforcement orders. “This is the first time a company has been found by the CMA to have breached an [order] by consciously refusing to report all the required information,” the CMA said in a press release. 

Engadget

The troubles with Facebook just never ends although $70m is probably not significant to Facebook.

Categories
Stocks Technology

Uber completes Drizly acquisition

Uber Technologies, Inc. today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Drizly and that the two companies will begin integrating their complementary delivery apps and services. The purchase consideration was approximately $1.1 billion, consisting of approximately 18.7 million newly issued shares of Uber common stock plus cash.

Uber

On other new, cannabis marketplace Lantern is spun out of Drizly.

I think the Drizly-Uber combintion will be something to watch out for. It’s good to see Uber doubling down on delivery. There’s so much opportunities there for both companies.