Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B

https://www.theverge.com/news/758218/perplexity-google-chrome-bid-unsolicited-offer

35•ndr•2h ago

Comments

mywacaday•2h ago

Financial times article: https://archive.is/dGdnj

OxfordOutlander•1h ago

Lol

lmao even.

perihelions•1h ago

Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 ("Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome (wsj.com)"—115 comments)

ndr•1h ago

Perhaps not a coincidence, $34.5B is Google's profit in 2025q1:

https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/20...

impulser_•12m ago

It's also the estimated monthly active users of chrome * 10.

JSR_FDED•1h ago

Perplexing indeed

nodesocket•55m ago

This 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•52m ago

I'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.

ymolodtsov•39m ago

But 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.

CPLX•40m ago

I 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•45m ago

- cash burning startup - no moat - dependent on third-party APIs and platforms

TZubiri•31m ago

Lol 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

wina•27m ago

I wonder how much would Google pay to a new owner of Chrome for a default search engine deal.

a3w•24m ago

With Chrome's market share? 10+ billion a year, certainly, as that would be only 3% of the ad volume.

Can google sell, then create Chrome2 based on Chromium, ripping off Perplexity?

happosai•20m ago

Genuis. 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.

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