Google Offered $30 Billion to Buy Snap Inc (Report)

The bid occurred nearly a year before its highly anticipated initial public offering in March

Google was willing to pay $30 billion for Snap — parent company of Snapchat — nearly a year before its highly anticipated initial public offering back in March, according to a Thursday report by Business Insider.

The Silicon Valley heavyweight approached Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in May 2016 with the buyout opportunity, and reignited talks right before Snap was available on the New York Stock Exchange, per the outlet. The offer was an “open secret” among Snap’s bigwigs.

Instead, Snap went public at a $24 billion valuation earlier this year — although its fallen on hard times since reporting uninspiring growth and revenue for Q1. Snap shares have nose-dived about 23 percent in the past month, with investors nervous about the end of its shareholder lockup period and Instagram’s continued growth.

But even with its struggles, Snap still carries a market cap of more than $15 billion. With its Q2 earnings set for next Thursday, it has an opportunity to show Wall Street why it was 2017’s most anticipated public offering in the first place.

It’s easy to see why Google would be interested in Snapchat; for all of its dominance in the advertising and product sphere, its social networking history is mixed, at best. Remember Google Plus? Adding Snapchat to its array of services would’ve been a coup, giving it another weapon in its arsenal against Facebook.

It’s also easy to see why Evan Spiegel — an exec that marches to the beat of his own drum, to much success — would rather hold onto Snap. He turned down Facebook’s $3 billion in cash buyout offer in 2013, only two years after his disappearing messaging app had come to fruition.

“There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this,” Spiegel told Forbes in 2014. “I think trading that for some short-term gain isn’t very interesting.”

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