Nah, HDDVD promotions group paying about 150 million in incentives to get paramount exclusive and getting tranformers exclusive, for it only to flop against 2 blu ray catalog titles. lot of money to still lose.

How about Intel's huge move into buying communications companies in early 2000's? Such as Level One (2.2b), Dialogic (800m), Giga (1.2b)? Over 4b wasted on just 3 companies. All of them never made any money for Intel, most were sliced and diced and finally sold off at great lost.


I know this is backwards, but AOL buying Time Warner with massively overvalued stock and then promptly becoming a massive drag on the combined company has to be the most ridiculous acquisition of the last decade.

I think this list is a little stupid!

Sure the deals mentioned do look stupid today (some more than others). But at the time many of them made good sense and after all nobody knows the future.

I could be wrong...but with regard to "that sinking feeling", I'm thinking that 5 million consumers spending 200 bickies too much equals a cool billion in over expenditure. Sure it's collective, but 5 million collective "sinking feelings" could sink the Quenn Mary.

What about AMD buying ATI?!?

AMD buying ATI?????
I thought that one would be on the list.Combined worth $20.0bn, net worth today $6.3bn.....

Number 1 overpriced acquisition in my book is the At Home (@Home) broadband service's payment of over $6 BILLION for the Excite web site. Six billion dollars for a WEB PAGE?
Oh of course they called it a "web portal", but that didn't give it any more real value.

Now in retrospect I wonder what kind of pollution 'footprint' AOL left with all those pointless free AOL CD's
They must have given out at least 500 million of the things.


As the other person said, the Ebay purchase of Skype is, without doubt, the most overpriced acquisition ever and for all time. Skype and Ebay have NOTHING in common, the $2.6 billion purchase price is far above the annual Skype sales, and the Skype assets are worth about $2 million total. Ebay just wrote off $1.4 billion of the purchase price and covered it up with a lot of GAAP/non-GAAP nonsense. The rest will soon follow...

bluemountain?

Let's not forget AMD & ATI Damit!

Actually HP-Compaq was not that bad, at least Compaq name still live on. I think it is well priced,

On the other hand, Skype / Ebay was really overpriced, I am expected someone crazy to aquire Facebook, lolz, 15b+++, a price that might see overpriced in 2007

Citrix for Xen Source at $500M.

Come on. Put $500M in bonds, and you have $25M a year. That will pay for 100 engineers annually off the interest alone. Xen Source is nowhere near that big. And only had $8M in revenue last year.

I nominate it dumbest acquisition of the decade.



How can you miss what was far and away the biggest takeover bust of all time was the AOL Time Warner deal. This deal outvalued all the others mention in this article by a factor of 50. $182 bilion. How can you miss it? What type of research was done for this waste of time article?

The bighest fiasco in recent history was the buying of CNN/TIME by AOL. AOL on it's own is now obsolete no wonder it reverted back to cnn/time which has greater brand value.

I totally cringed at the headline for the article and crossed my fingers that Cobalt wasn't on the list. Doh!

Still, the Sun-Cobalt deal worked out ok for most of the Cobalt employees, disheartening as said mothballing was.

ebay shelling out $2.6bn for skype trumps them all in my opinion...

Yahoo buys broadcast.com for $5.04 billion, didn't do anything for the bottom line at Yahoo. 

Next week: "Top 5 Dumbest Partnerships"
I nominate Yahoo-Google as #1.

Hi Marty - synergies are very important. I am sure you agree!

it hurt like it never should have to find out hp was absorbing compaq. i wonder what would've come of it if apple and compaq had joined...

You missed an early big one: Borland buying Ashton Tate. Can't remember how much, but it was a disaster. [Surely catastrophe? Ed.]