Domain 07 · 16 cases
Negotiation & Deals
M&A, leverage, walkaway prices and the stakeholders who can veto a deal, from Disney and Pixar to Facebook and Instagram, Yahoo, Microsoft and beyond.
- Set a true ceiling before competition distorts your judgment
- Find the trade that costs you little but matters to them
- Map the non-business stakeholder who can kill a deal
AOL and Time Warner
In January 2000, AOL and Time Warner announced a merger valued at roughly $165 billion, dial-up's hottest stock fused with the most prestigious content…
Broadcom and Qualcomm
In 2018, Broadcom launched a roughly $117 billion hostile bid for Qualcomm, set to be the largest technology acquisition in history. The US government killed…
Daimler and Chrysler
In 1998, Daimler-Benz and Chrysler announced a $36 billion "merger of equals" that was supposed to create a global automotive powerhouse, German engineering…
Disney Buys Fox
In late 2017, Disney agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox for about $52 billion. Rupert Murdoch wanted scale, a streaming future, and a clean outcome for…
Disney Buys Pixar
By the early 2000s, Pixar was the most creatively valuable studio in Hollywood and Disney was its struggling distribution partner, with the contract expiring…
Elon Musk and Twitter
Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for about $44 billion in April 2022 at $54.20 a share, having waived standard diligence. By June he wanted out, citing bot…
Facebook Buys Instagram
In April 2012, Facebook paid about $1 billion for a 13-person photo app with no revenue. Eighteen months later it looked like the deal of the decade.…
Facebook Buys WhatsApp
In 2014 Facebook paid roughly $19 billion for WhatsApp, a messaging app with about 450 million monthly users, 55 employees, and almost no revenue. On paper…
Google Buys YouTube and Android
In 2005 Google paid about $50 million for a startup of fewer than 20 people whose mobile operating system had never shipped. A year later it paid roughly…
Kraft and Cadbury
In 2010, Kraft Foods won a hostile, deeply unpopular $19 billion takeover of Cadbury, the beloved British confectioner founded by a Quaker family in…
LVMH and Tiffany
In November 2019, LVMH agreed to buy Tiffany for about $16.2 billion, a record price for a luxury acquisition and a crown-jewel American brand Bernard…
Microsoft Buys Activision Blizzard
Microsoft announced a roughly $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard in January 2022, and the strategic logic was clear from day one: gaming content, a…
Quaker and Snapple
In 1994 Quaker paid roughly $1.7 billion for Snapple, a quirky, cult-followed beverage brand built on grassroots marketing and a dense web of independent…
Salesforce Buys Slack
In 2021 Salesforce paid about $27.7 billion for Slack — its largest acquisition ever, at a price almost nobody called cheap. The logic wasn't really Slack's…
T-Mobile and Sprint
T-Mobile and Sprint announced their merger in April 2018. It didn't close until April 2020, surviving two years of regulatory warfare that nearly killed it…
Yahoo Turns Down Microsoft
In February 2008, Microsoft offered about $44 billion for Yahoo, a 62 percent premium over its share price. Jerry Yang and the board called it inadequate and…
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