It's funny how there seems to be so little correlation between acquisition prices and eventual value. The PA Semi acquisition was an enormous success at what was at the time a tiny price. NeXT was an enormous success, though $400M at the time was a bet-the-farm price for Apple.

In contrast, while I'm sure Beats has easily paid for itself, $3B was not exactly cheap, and the results were not 10x PA Semi.

I thought about NeXT, but that was a bit of a weird one, because NeXT executives and technology replaced a lot of Apple’s executives and technology. That ended up being a stealth takeover by NeXT.