LinkedIn for $26 billion looked expensive in 2016. It generates $15 billion a year now. Patience is the best due diligence.
Everyone told me Blinkit was a bad deal. Blinkit is now our fastest growing business. Sometimes you have to trust your own analysis.
Red Hat was a 34 billion dollar bet on open source and hybrid cloud. History will judge whether it was brilliant or desperate. I believe it was brilliant.
I bought Formula One for 4.4 billion dollars. Everyone said I overpaid. Revenue has doubled since. The crowd is usually wrong about sports media.
The hostile takeover of Arcelor was a 33 billion dollar bet that European steelmakers needed an Indian to show them how to compete.
We acquired Gorillas thinking consolidation would fix the economics. Combining two unprofitable companies does not create one profitable company.
PayPal was inside eBay. We bought it for 1.5 billion. It became worth 300 billion. Sometimes your best investment is the one hiding inside your company.
The EMC acquisition was 67 billion dollars. The largest tech deal in history. When I bet I bet big.
When we acquire a company, we know within 30 days whether it's going to work. Speed of integration is everything.
When you acquire a creative company, the worst thing you can do is impose corporate culture on it.
We own CryptoPunks, Meebits, and Bored Apes. That's the three most important NFT collections in history under one roof.
When you buy a European brand, you buy 100 years of engineering. When you build a Chinese brand, you have 10 years of learning ahead. I chose to buy.
They said a Chinese company couldn’t run Volvo. Volvo’s revenue has tripled. I let the numbers do the talking.
$21 billion for a company I built with my hands over 35 years. Johnson & Johnson got a bargain.
We do not buy companies to collect them. We buy them to make them the best-run companies in their industry.
We buy companies that others think are broken. Usually the products are fine. It is the management that needs fixing.
The Ranbaxy acquisition was the hardest thing I have ever done. But the best investments are never easy.
Intel paid $15.3 billion for us, then IPO'd us at $17 billion. Not a bad trade for either side.
The Wanda deal was not impulsive. We saw a rare window to acquire quality assets at prices that reflected a seller's urgency, not the assets' true value.
People used to think I was a fool for overpaying for Paramount. Now the only question is whether I was wise enough.
We've made acquisitions that looked risky from the outside. But we knew the assets better than anyone else in the room. That's the advantage.
The OZ Minerals acquisition gives us a significant copper growth platform in a Tier 1 jurisdiction, and that is exactly what we want to own more of.
We are not going to do a deal just because the market expects us to. Every dollar we spend has to earn a return above our hurdle rate, full stop.
Acquiring Equans is a major milestone in the history of Bouygues. It makes our Group a global leader in multi-technical services and reinforces our resilience.