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In 1998, $1 was worth $1.53 (in 2018 dollars), so this transaction would feel like a $6.4B deal.
by shshhdhs 8y ago
In 1998, $1 was worth $1.53 (in 2018 dollars), so this transaction would feel like a $6.4B deal.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoYeah, but Netscape was purchased with AOL stock, which was wildly inflated at the time, so you could also argue it feels like a couple hundred mil deal given the eventual tanking of AOL stock. That was the thing about a lot of the huge deals of the original dotcom bubble. Most of them were made at inflated prices with (inflated) stock of the purchaser, but it's not like anyone ever paid that much cash for the total amount of those shares. That's one reason when the bubble burst that while painful it wasn't devastating to the overall economy: most of the insane valuations were never fully "realized" in the first place, so when they fell back to earth it really didn't wipe out as much wealth as the headline numbers made it seem.