The Biggest Tech Mergers and Acquisitions of All Time

Tech companies drop massive sums of money on mergers and acquisitions. Here arethe most lucrative M&A deals of the modern technology era.

By Rob Marvin

Tech companies have a lot of money. Two — Apple and Amazon — have eclipsed a trillion-dollar market cap, while others, including Alphabet and Microsoft, aren’t far behind. And one thing tech giants love to do with their money is scoop up other companies in massive merger and acquisition (M&A) deals.

Every year, billions upon billions of dollars change hands in service of corporate consolidation. New blockbuster tech deals reshape the landscape so often that we decided to start keeping track of the most lucrative ones. The list starts with deals of only a couple billion and works its way up to the biggest tech mergers and acquisitions we’ve seen to date.

However, you won’t find futile efforts like Broadcom’s blocked $121 billion deal to buy Qualcomm or Qualcomm’s failed $47 billion bid for NXP Semiconductors here. Qualcomm has had a rough go in the M&A world lately, but its struggles exemplify one very important rule: the deal isn’t closed until it clears government and regulatory approval. If a deal has been announced but hasn’t yet closed, you’ll see an asterisk next to its entry on the list.

We’re also not including stock buybacks, public companies going private via buyout, or the massive consolidation in the telecommunications space, because we have to draw the line somewhere. We’ll update this list as new tech mergers and acquisitions emerge. Thanks to capitalism and the tech industry’s outsize influence on the economy, you can be sure that eventually, there will always be a bigger deal.

Apple’s 2014 deal to buy Beats is the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history, but it’s the cheapest deal on this list. The tech giant has made dozens of acquisitions since the late ’80s, but only one deal valued at more than a billion. For all its cash on hand, compared to the likes of Google and Microsoft, Apple has been positively frugal.

Nest was a Google shop from the get-go; former Apple exec Tony Fadell co-founded Nest in 2011 with backing from Google Ventures. Three years later, Google brought Nest in-house in a $3.2 billion deal. It’s been a bit of a rocky road, but after a February re-org, Nest’s smart home lineup of thermostats, locks, and cameras join the Home smart speakers to become the foundation of the Google’s smart home lineup. Nest is also at the front line of Google’s smart home war with Amazon, which recently scooped up smart home security company Ring for a paltry $1 billion.

Walmart isn’t going down against Amazon without a fight. The retail chain’s $3.3 billion deal for e-commerce site Jet.com in 2016 has led Walmart to launch new online services and experiment with features like same-day delivery to compete with Amazon on the coveted urban millennial shopper demographic.

Cisco has spent the last several years shifting from hardware to software and services. The enterprise tech giant’s $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics in 2017 bought the company a market-leading stake in the application performance management (APM) and infrastructure monitoring space. Adding some drama to the deal, Cisco scooped up AppDynamics only a day before the company was set to go public for around $100 million.

This is the story of a precariously named media company called Oath. In 2015, Verizon began building its media arm with a $4.4 billion deal to buy AOL, giving it a media portfolio including The Huffington Post (bought by AOL in 2011), TechCrunch (bought by AOL in 2010), Moviefone, and a collection of other small blogs and video platforms.

Oath, which combines AOL and Yahoo’s assets, was born in 2017 after Verizon completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of Yahoo. Of course the original deal value was $4.8 billion, but Verizon dropped the purchase price by $350 million in the wake of Yahoo’s catastrophic string of data breach disclosures affecting more than 3 billion accounts over several years.

The most recent deal on this list is Adobe’s proposed $4.75 billion acquisition of marketing automation software company Marketo. Marketo was founded in 2006, went public in 2013, and was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.8 billion in 2016. The deal is going through regulatory approval and is expected to close by year’s end. (Photo by Lisa Werner/Getty Images)

There are quite a few Microsoft deals on this list. Some are good deals; many are not. The $6.3 billion deal to buy online ad network aQuantive in 2007 is one of the latter. One of the worst deals of the Steve Ballmer era (and there are several) was chalked up as a massive loss when Microsoft wrote down almost the entire value of the deal ($6.19 billion) in 2012. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images)

Salesforce’s $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, which closed in May, gives the enterprise software giant a microservices play to integrate all of its cloud-based apps with MuleSoft’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration platform.

Salesforce has been making plenty of acquisitions lately, including spending $2.8 billion for Demandware in 2016 and scooping up Attic Labs, CloudCraze, and Datorama in addition to MuleSoft in 2018 alone. CEO Marc Benioff also became the latest tech billionaire to buy into the media world, acquiring Time magazine from the Meredith Corporation for $190 million.

Aside from aQuantive, none of Microsoft’s deals looks quite so dreadful in retrospect as its doomed acquisition of Nokia. Steve Ballmer’s $7.2 billion goodbye present in 2013 saddled the company with Nokia’s handset business and mobile IP just before Satya Nadella took over as CEO (and had to take long walks with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in the snow). By the time the deal closed in 2014, Ballmer was gone. A year later, Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion from the Nokia deal and announced 7,800 job cuts as Elop left the company.

Under Nadella, Microsoft has successfully shifted away from hardware (aside from its Surface lineup) toward a cloud, software, and services-focused portfolio. The Nokia deal was a relic of a bygone era when the company was playing perpetual catch-up on smartphones after Ballmer famously said in 2007 that the iPhone had “no chance” of gaining market share.

In one of the biggest tech acquisitions of its day, Oracle took control of the Java programming language by outbidding IBM for Sun Microsystems in 2009. The deal has had ripple effects on the developer world for years, but maybe its most lasting legacy is the almost decade-long legal battle between Google and Oracle over Java copyrights in the Android operating system. (Photo by Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images)

Microsoft’s second-biggest deal of the Nadella era solidifies the company’s about-face on open source with a $7.5 billion acquisition of the largest host of open-source code in the world. Microsoft has big plans for how to integrate the popular code-sharing platform and developer community into its cloud ecosystem, but those will have to wait for the deal to close.

Another entry, another Microsoft deal. The tech giant closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype in 2011, and has since integrated the video chat service across its business and consumer app portfolio. The word “Skype” has even become a verb.

Oracle’s $10.3 billion acquisition of HR and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provider PeopleSoft is one of the most contentious acquisitions in tech M&A history. The 2004 deal marked the bitter end of several years of hostile takeover attempts and lawsuits until Larry Ellison ultimately got his prize and bought PeopleSoft into submission.

Qualcomm’s bid for NXP may have failed, but NXP was already a chip powerhouse thanks to its $11.8 billion deal to buy auto chipmaker Freescale in 2015. The acquisition ensured that NXP chips live in everything from entertainment and security systems to almost every connected element of a vehicle. (Photo by Vincent Jannink/AFP/Getty Images)

Google’s biggest-ever acquisition also turned out to be quite the misfire. Google spent $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility in 2011, largely to scoop up its vast patent library. The deal closed in 2012. As for actually manufacturing Google-branded Motorola phones, that part never made Google any money. So just two years later, Google flipped Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, while holding on to those patents. As for why Google sold Motorola and why Lenovo bought it, check out this 2014 analysis from PCMag’s Lead Analyst Sascha Segan.

Alcatel-Lucent has gone through several iterations in the past dozen years. In 2006, Alcatel and Lucent agreed to merge in a $13.4 billion deal to create a combined telecom equipment powerhouse. Over the next few years, Alcatel-Lucent acquired a few more parts, and sold and spun off several others until Nokia (the non-smartphone iteration of the company post-Microsoft sale) announced plans to acquire it in 2015. For what happened next, read on. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

Security company Symantec dropped $13.5 billion in 2004 to buy data storage provider Veritas Software, which created the fourth largest software company at the time. It’s also worth noting that security software company VeriSign, which Symantec acquired in 2010 for $1.25 billion, previously bought domain name registration company Network Solutions for a whopping $21 billion during the dotcom boom in 2000. If you go back far enough, tech acquisitions are like Russian nesting dolls. Inside one company are the remnants of several others.

Not a tech acquisition, you say? Amazon would beg to differ. Amazon’s blockbuster $13.7 billion deal to buy the nationwide chain of Whole Foods supermarkets gave the company an existing brick-and-mortar retail infrastructure to expand its online shopping operations. Amazon has since introduced things like Amazon Prime perks, 30-minute grocery pickups, and a slew of other cross-promotional efforts to turn Whole Foods locations into yet another extension of Amazon’s e-commerce empire.

Intel made a big move into AI and autonomous vehicles when it spent $15 billion on Israeli self-driving tech company MobileEye in 2017. MobileEye’s computer vision, machine learning, and mapping tech now powers or will underly Intel driver-assisted and autonomous driving systems in car brands including Fiat-Chrysler and BMW, and Intel is also working with Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving car unit.

Walmart’s efforts to keep with with Amazon didn’t stop at Jet.com. In May 2018, the company announced a $16 billion deal to take a 77 percent stake in Indian e-commerce company Flipkart. The deal closed in August to expand Walmart’s fight with Amazon to another one of the world’s biggest markets.

Nokia’s $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent was announced in 2015 and closed in 2016. The move positioned Nokia as one the top players in telecom networking technology and services. It set the stage for the emergence of 5G networks next year and beyond, with Nokia as one of the few major suppliers of 5G equipment for telecom companies around the world, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. (Photo by Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook’s most expensive acquisition wasn’t Instagram ($1 billion) or Oculus ($2 billion), but its $22 billion deal to buy messaging app WhatsApp. Originally valued at $16 billion in early 2014, the price tag ballooned to $22 billion by October 2014 when the deal closed due to the soaring value of Facebook stock at the time.

As recent high-profile departures of both WhatsApp and Instagram’s founders might suggest, the long-term health of Facebook’s acquisitions may be far shakier than initially thought as the social giant’s protracted trials and tribulations continue.

Many years of shifting markets and bad decisions led to HP’s 2015 split into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise, but none has quite so dubious a distinction as HP’s $25 billion deal to buy computer manufacturer Compaq in 2001. Widely considered one of the worst tech mergers in history, shareholders objected to then-CEO Carly Fiorina’s move over overlapping product lines and low profit margins in a traditional PC business that many of its competitors were already exiting at the time. In the four years following the deal, the merged HP lost half its market value and Fiorina resigned in 2005.

HP made another doomed $11 billion deal for UK software company Autonomy in 2011. That one led to a fraud lawsuit and indictment for Autonomy’s founder before HP ultimately sold off the last of Autonomy’s assets to Micro Focus in 2016. We’ll leave this disastrous deal as a footnote to HP’s even more expensive misfire. While we’re at it, HP also spent $13.9 billion on Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 2008. We could’ve given all three of these deals their own spot, but for the sake of brevity (or at least some semblance of it on this very long list), consider this your HP entry. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

Of all Microsoft’s expensive acquisitions on this list, its biggest one ever was the $26.2 billion deal to buy LinkedIn. By the time the deal closed in late 2016, Microsoft had already begun enacting plans to integrate the social network for professionals with Office 365, its sales and business software offerings, and building a dedicated LinkedIn Windows 10 app that rolled out in 2017.

LinkedIn under Microsoft is still young, but there are still plenty of ways Microsoft might cross-polinate to make use of LinkedIn’s data and access to IT decision-makers who might be using Microsoft products. The move also brought LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman into the fold as a Microsoft board member, and gave Nadella’s Microsoft a much stronger foothold in Silicon Valley.

SoftBank’s $32 billion deal to buy chip manufacturer ARM was certainly a divisive one. Even at PCMag, some people liked the deal and others thought it was a bad idea for everyone involved.

Since the acquisition, ARM has been growing like crazy and losing a lot of money. SoftBank has also leveraged ARM’s chip licenses into a range of new use cases as the company unveils new AI chips and angles to cut into the market shares of Intel, Qualcomm, and other competitors. The jury’s still out on this deal.

Avago’s $37 billion deal to buy Broadcom was the biggest tech deal ever, until it wasn’t. The combined chip and semiconductor powerhouse then tried to buy Qualcomm for what would’ve been a record-breaking $121 billion, but we know how that turned out. Instead, Broadcom’s consolation prize is an $18.9 billion acquisition of enterprise software company CA Technologies. That deal was announced in July and has not yet closed. (Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The richest deal of them all, at least for now, is Dell and equity firm Silver Lake’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC. Dell has been making all sorts of moves lately, including its return to a public company this summer.

Dell also reportedly tried to pull off a reverse-merger with VMware earlier this year that did not come to fruition. Instead, Dell will reportedly acquire a VMware tracking stock instead as it now reportedly reconsiders an IPO if the tracking stock deal falls through. Capitalism, baby. It always finds a way.

Read more: “A Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Is Still a Bad Idea”

Originally published at www.pcmag.com.