Ballmer: $50B for Yahoo may be spent elsewhere
InternetNews | at | by Mike
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Friday that buying Yahoo was not a strategy in itself, and dropping the bid meant it now had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions.
"Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing; it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business," he told a packed hall at a technology conference in Moscow.
"We will spend money on some acquisitions, he said. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars."
Ballmer was responding to questions about what he planned to do with Microsoft's huge cash pile after it walked away from a proposal to buy Internet media company Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 a share earlier this month. Yahoo had rebuffed the offer, saying it would only settle for $37 per share.