Skype worth 3 billion?
Cringley apparently has the inside scoop on how News Corp almost closed a deal last week to buy Skype for $3 billion. That number is not a misprint!
He speculates at the end that the acquisition was never serious, but to still have stirred up the market value to this amount is amazing.
If the story is true, here’s two possibilities:
1– Murdoch didn’t want to buy Skype, but knowing that some of his media/cable/telco/internet competitors are interested, is more than happy to step in and drive up the price to make it painfully expensive for whoever does buy them. Kind of like Vodafone sitting there bidding for AT&T against Cingular– one suspects that Vodafone’s participation was only to make Cingular overpay, which would effectively help Verizon (which Vodafone owns 45%).
2– Murdoch is trying to establish himself as a leading indicator of bubble behaviour. It was, after all, this same man that tried to buy PointCast for $400 million in the Web1.0 bubble days. We all remember how it was finally sold for a few million just a couple years later. Offering $3 billion for Skype could be seen as the encore to paying almost $580 million for MySpace.
It would be kind of interesting if Skype were bought for some insane amount. The inflationary impact on the Estonian economy would be pretty high, I imagine!