/biz/ - Business & Finance

apparently Bezos considered launching a hostile takeover of the National Enquier

>One possibility they apparently considered was for Bezos to buy AMI, not kill the story (???), and I suppose, once in possession of AMI’s records, find out who leaked the information to the Enquirer.

>et’s just imagine if it had happened! Imagine if a tabloid owned by a public company threatened to publish nudes of Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Bezos just lobbed in a hostile bid—funded by his personal fortune, not by Amazon—to buy the publisher at a premium. He would have to put out a tender-offer disclosure document, and in the “Purpose of the Offer” section he would just write “revenge,” and in the “Plans for the Target” section he could write “I am going to find out who leaked my nudes and exact ruinous vengeance on them, and that’s it, I haven’t thought about any other plans.” And then management and Bezos would make their respective cases to shareholders: Management and its investment bankers would put together a detailed slide deck explaining their long-term business plans and financial projections, while Bezos would put out two slides, one saying “Vengeance Will Be Mine” over that picture of him looking buff in a vest, and the other printing the price of his all-cash offer in a really big font. And then management’s investment bankers would issue an opinion saying that Bezos’s offer was inadequate and he’d be like “fine double it then, I don’t care, how much could a newspaper publisher possibly cost, do you know how rich I am.” And politicians would rail against short-termism in corporate America, and point to the fact that valuable productive companies could be bought by corporate raiders just to strip them down to a single piece of information, and Bezos would be like “yes that’s true but have you considered how much money I have.”

fucking based.