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Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B
- digitcatphd 1y agoThis is clearly a PR stunt. Perplexity knows Google would not sell Chrome, it is the holy grail of their ads strategy and would cripple their moat.
- echelon 1y ago> would cripple their moat. Would end their unfair monopolistic control over the web, search, and digital advertising. The DOJ or the FTC need to force this dismantlement.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoYou may be unaware that Google has lost an antitrust suit and that the DOJ has asked the courts to require Google sell Chrome. Whether or not Google can bribe their way out of it is yet to be seen, but they may not have a choice, so it's a pretty big one time opportunity.
- scarface_74 1y agoYes and the courts are idiots. Why buy Chrome when you they can get Chromium for free? What good is Chrome outside of Google? Not to mention what does that mean for ChromeOS?
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoThe courts have, for the first time in decades, done their job. It seems ridiculous now but it should've been done ten years ago. The impact is in removing Google's control of the customer base, not in a copy of the code.
- JustExAWS 1y agoAnd the customer base is still is going to voluntarily choose to go to Google search and YouTube like they always have. That’s where the money is. Windows still has the majority of the desk to market share and Google search is not the default. Yet people still choose to use Google. As far as Chrome itself, every single desktop OS user except for those forced to use ChromeOS went out of their way to willingly download Chrome.
- philistine 1y agoAnd how, pray tell, where all of these people made aware of Chrome? Google made the first ad for its front page for Chrome. This is not in itself a problem, but Google has a monopoly in search and ads. They cannot be allowed to also have a monopoly in browsers. That’s the whole point of American monopoly laws. Once you have a monopoly, you can’t do everything you want. There are limits. Owning a browser is too much power in one monopolistic giant.
- JustExAWS 1y agoSo let’s say that Google doesn’t own Chrome. Does that affect where Google actually makes its money? In 2025 when most people first by a Windows computer, do they use Bing or go to Google? Google does not have a monopoly on ads. Billions are spent on ads on Facebook properties, Amazon, Apple (app store), TikTok. People choose to use Google for search and can go to any other search engine if they choose. In 2025, Google search is so bad more and more people are using LLM based search tools.
- philistine 1y agoWhile the vibes around Google Search are indeed bad, the numbers haven't shown a dip in usage. And it's not like Google has rested on its laurels. They're shoving AI in search as much as they can.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoThis is an extremely naive take. Sundar Pichai's claim to fame was getting the Google Toolbar and Chrome pushed into the Adobe Reader installer back in the day. So many OEMs were shoving Chrome and Google into their default loads that Microsoft had to make a "Bing Edition" of Windows for a bit with a lower price to include Bing and Edge as default, and have now outright blocked the practice I believe. When you visit Google Search or Gmail on your default browser, you get at least one but sometimes as many as three separate popups telling you to install Chrome for "faster" ability to search/email. Today many product vendors incorrectly claim that their website or service will only work on Chrome, and refuse to provide support unless you switch to it. Oh, and my personal favorite: If you aren't the admin of a PC, Chrome malware-installs in the user profile folder so you can circumvent your IT department! Google's power to force Chrome on people is insane, and as the government has now determined, illegally anticompetitive.
- philistine 1y agoThat’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser. People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
- scarface_74 1y agoAre they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there. Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue? The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
- philistine 1y agoYou're discussing the wrong thing; Google might have to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search and ads. Not on the browser.
- scarface_74 1y agoAnd getting rid of Chrome is not going to stop people from choosing to go to Google. The desktop with the largest market share neither comes with Chrome nor has Google as the default search engine and people still go there. As far as ads, there are three trillion+ market cap companies with a thriving ad business - Google, Amazon and Meta.
- digitcatphd 1y agoAlso likely a political PR stunt.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoThis is a completely bipartisan aligned issue. Trump's administration has basically said that Biden's antitrust enforcement is the one thing they did right (in their opinion). These investigations started under Trump 1, continued under Biden, and will likely be successfully enforced under Trump 2. There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
- techMac111 1y agoNo core AI model, Its a wrapper, And valuation at $18 billion is just fabricated fake PR, After deep seek and other free Core AI models based AI tools it has no future and its CEO knows that is why he is just focusing on public stunts & then raising as much as he can and withdraw by packing massive paychecks to himself.
- mywacaday 1y agoFinancial times article: https://archive.is/dGdnj https://archive.is/dGdnj
- OxfordOutlander 1y ago[flagged]
- perihelions 1y agoAlso, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 ("Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome (wsj.com)"—115 comments)
- ndr 1y agoPerhaps not a coincidence, $34.5B is Google's profit in 2025q1: https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/2025q1-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/20...
- impulser_ 1y agoIt's also the estimated monthly active users of chrome * 10.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoPerplexing indeed
- nodesocket 1y agoThis is a troll right by Aravind? $34B is nearly double the valuation of Perplexity. I find it hard to believe so called “multiple investment funds” agreed to pony up that much cash. Kind of childish by Aravind.
- turblety 1y agoI'm pretty sure if Google agreed, they could come up with the money. Chrome is essentially the gateway to 90% of the world on the internet.
- bogtog 1y agoIf Google agreed to just $34B, getting the cash would be so straightforward that even many random Joes on the street would be able to figure it out
- ymolodtsov 1y agoBut here's the thing, nobody can monetize that space as effectively as Google, except maybe Meta. It's the same sort of confusion many people have about Google paying Apple. It's not just for the default position, it's a revenue-share for the ads seen by Apple users on Google's properties. Nobody has the same potential.
- bsenftner 1y agoYou just said the magic words, "nobody!", that's throwing the gauntlet in front of every major toxic masculine billionaire. Now Trump HAS to buy it, and show everyone. Musk HAS to buy it, just like how he showed everyone how to run Twitter. And of course, Bezos HAS to buy it to prevent them from using Chrome to destroy Amazon... Popcorn time!
- CPLX 1y agoI don't think any serious tech company with somewhat competent leadership would have any bit of trouble raising that much cash to buy Chrome if they had an accepted offer and ability to close.
- fakedang 1y ago- cash burning startup - no moat - dependent on third-party APIs and platforms
- wina 1y agoI wonder how much would Google pay to a new owner of Chrome for a default search engine deal.
- a3w 1y agoWith Chrome's market share? 10+ billion a year, certainly, as that would be only 3% of the ad volume. Can google sell, then have Alphabet Holding create Chrome2 based on Chromium, ripping off Perplexity?
- andrepd 1y agoJesus how the fuck does advertising make such ungodly amounts of money.
- marcos100 1y agoBecause it works really well
- pennomi 1y agoBecause we spent an entire generation of the world’s most brilliant engineers on optimizing ad revenue. Makes me sad, we could have been on Mars by now if we had decided that spaceflight was more important than social media.
- patrick0d 1y agoanyone who spends 10 years writing performance reviews and rebuilding a service they already rebuilt last year, all to collect RSUs, was never going to land us on mars
- guappa 1y agoBecause if you don't pay they bury you so low you will never sell anything.
- jimbohn 1y agoYou need to pay to exist
- TZubiri 1y agoLol not a chance, remember that they got into browsers because that's almost the same tech for web crawling. It's a core tech for their 1T mcap company
- robertlagrant 1y agoThey got into browsers to make sure all the google properties (all web based) worked really well and weren't held back by Microsoft's dead-ending of web browser development.
- IX-103 1y agoAnd also to prevent (or at least delay) the app-ification of the web, because apps are not searchable.
- robertlagrant 1y agoYes!
- TZubiri 1y agoNot really. Google has Android first of all, and apps. So it's incorrect that all google properties are web based. Second, web apps would work just fine on browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IExplorer. Thinking that someone would develop a browser so that their webapps work well is missing the point entirely. If the user trusts you enough to download your application and your engineers can write code that interfaces with the OS, you would just develop an native application. Writing a browser to write your webapps would just be incredibly inefficient, and as a side effect it would help your competitors. Google developed a javascript engine to parse webpages with javascript, then they realized they basically had a browser so voila, and that they could slap search on the search bar, so voila they published a browser.
- happosai 1y agoGenuis. The ultimate way to bypass all AI bot crawling blocks. Just make every chrome browser upload whatever they view to perplexity for training data^W^WAI summarizing.
- senectus1 1y agoexactly why Google will not accept.
- alephnerd 1y agoAlso for monetizing AI Search. Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website. It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0]. This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B. [0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-us...
- monday_ 1y ago"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer." ".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?" "I understand your concern, I really do. But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability! Consider a gorilla. The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it. breathes heavily The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it. We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law. Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson. bows " --- Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news "And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?" "God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
- mmmllm 1y agoPR stunt. Now we are all participating.
- PedroBatista 1y agoI get the feeling this Perplexity guy is a mix of SBF the bitcoin dude with the Palantir guy but actually dreams to be early Elon, or a troll. Maybe another another deep state plant? If we really want to go that road.. Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
- pbarry25 1y agoTheir CEO is trash, eff Perplexity.
- mi_lk 1y agoGetting similar vibe and this performative move reinforces that
- navigate8310 1y agoHe is not even a US citizen. Something seems not right.
- biosboiii 1y agoI dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise. Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3). Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
- callamdelaney 1y agoFirefox seems to work pretty okay
- verandaguy 1y agoYeah, if anything the governance model is questionable. The browser itself is technically competitive with anything else out there.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> We get secure browsers Sure, if your definition of "security" doesn't include "giving users control over who the browsers are talking to".
- tomwheeler 1y agoNot much of a user-agent...
- forgotoldacc 1y agoI personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
- 1y ago
- fcanesin 1y agoMissing a zero here for a realistic valuation of the indisputable market leader in the most important interface of computing.
- inopinatus 1y agoI had no idea there was a new season of Silicon Valley.
- libertarian1 1y ago[dead]
- everdrive 1y agoHard to understand whether this is a positive or negative. Chrome is trampling the internet in favor of Google. Will Perplexity just make Chrome even worse than it is, or will they degrade Chrome's market share through incompetence? More competition in the browser space would be welcome, but I'm not optimistic.
- xnx 1y agoDon't feed the attention troll
- melodyogonna 1y agoLol, a lot of Google's $1t+ valuation is due to Chrome, $34b is a joke (to Google).
- dvh 1y agoLet's look at it from the other angle, what if instead of buying it they forked it and spend 34 billion on marketing it?
- JCM9 1y agoThis isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity. #32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
- mwigdahl 1y agoFunding secured!
- yalogin 1y agoPerplexity buying chrome would be a disaster, it just feels that way. Every vibe I got from that company is not good. They would commercialize every aspect of the browser so fast, as in insert ads everywhere. Again I just get that vibe.
- philistine 1y agoIt’s not just vibes. It’s cold hard cash. If you pay billions for something, you have to make that money back somehow.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656
- chaz6 1y agoHow much of that would trickle down to the developers who worked on KHTML on which Chrome is based I wonder. They should feel pretty chuffed that their offspring has resulted in such a large valuation.