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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

81–90 of 951 posts

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#81
post #65

This is probably a dumb question, but what does all cash mean? Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders? What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google sh…

Yes on all of that. All Cash means Google is essentially writing a $32Bn check which is dispersed to the Wiz shareholders. (It wouldn't go to Wiz's bank account since Google owns the bank account once they send the money.

Typically these involve at least some stock (cash + stock or all stock) which would mean that each Wiz share gets some amount of money and some multiple of Google stock per share.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#83
post #53

Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034 That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

Turns out McKinsey is really bad at business and letting a McKinsey ghoul run your company is a good way to run it into the ground.

GOOG is up ~152% since Sundar took over...

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#85
post #70

Sometime explain the strategic rationale behind this? Google's previous big acquisition in the cloud space, Looker, didn't exactly pan out.

I think Google sees a fast growing company and is acquiring it. Many GCP related acquisitions are weird, like Looker, Apogee and are awkward fits. Unsure how this goes.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#86
post #65

This is probably a dumb question, but what does all cash mean? Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders? What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google sh…

> Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders?

Google pays each of Wiz's shareholders 75-90% of the deal amount. The remainder is held in escrow and paid some time later based on a variety of conditions.

> What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google shares), or something of that sort?

Yup, that's exactly how it works.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#87
I'm marginally in the IT space... Is there anything to my reaction that at least in dollar terms this is a multiple of the dollar amount of what Whatsapp was acquired back in the day, which was a large consumer facing product that I could see was quite literally taking over messaging all over the world, and this is a... platform I've never heard of?

I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#88
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

Not sure if it's a very wise move to hire foreign intelligence offers and give them access to the core of your tech products and to the customers data.

Probably the entire company's purpose is to gain access to secrets.

Anyway, Chomsky claims that there's 0 distinction between USA and Israel, so if you see it from that point of view, it makes little difference.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#89

biggest Google acquisition yet or what?

Yes. The company’s previous biggest deal was its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2012, which it sold two years later for $2.9bn. [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/google-pa...

Can’t help but predict that this will be a similar outcome. If they did not have a security division, this acquisition could work. But colliding two heavy security behemoths together is like the collision of two galaxies with a higher enteopy.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#90
post #70

Sometime explain the strategic rationale behind this? Google's previous big acquisition in the cloud space, Looker, didn't exactly pan out.

I think Google sees a fast growing company and is acquiring it. Many GCP related acquisitions are weird, like Looker, Apogee and are awkward fits. Unsure how this goes.

On top of it this one is an amount that you wouldn't pay if it wasn't existential, and it really doesn't feel like it is.
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