Facebook's Price Tag For Oculus Actually $3 Billion, Zuckerberg Reveals in Court (cnbc.com) 48
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in court testimony Tuesday that the company actually paid $3 billion to buy Oculus. From a report on CNBC: His testimony came in a Dallas courtroom, when game maker ZeniMax alleges that Oculus, bought by Facebook in 2014, stole the company's intellectual property. ZeniMax's attorney pressed Zuckerberg on the total Facebook paid for the company. Zuckerberg revealed that beyond the $2 billion price tag, that was widely reported, Facebook paid an additional $700 million to retain employees and another $300 million earnout for hitting key milestones. Nearly three years after Oculus' acquisition Zuckerberg defended against allegations that Oculus stole ZeniMax's intellectual property, also explaining his interest in VR and how it fits into his vision for Oculus.
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They could have chosen to invest in a company that wasn't run by an idiot. I am sure he didn't mean to screw himself over, so proving malice is hard.
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figure 10 years down the road you can buy VR tickets to concerts, the superbowl and any other event with limited ticket supply. why pay $1000 to see some old and fat ass band from your childhood cause the scalpers bought all the tickets. buy it on VR and watch it at home from the same angle as front row seats
people i've talked to already prefer watching sports at home compared to watching it live, especially football. this is where VR will be good at
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By that time, I am sure camera technology will be such that the VR audience will get views that not even the front row seat holders get. I am thinking body mounted cameras, lots of 360 camera placements and drones.
If done right, you won't even miss the energy of the crowd because you will be as good as there with them.... which then begs the question: Will anyone still want to physically go to these events?
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If done right, you won't even miss the energy of the crowd because you will be as good as there with them....
Sure, if you're fine with a crowd that consists of NPCs.
Will anyone still want to physically go to these events?
Yes. It might be difficult to understand, but some people might go to these events mostly because of other people going to these events.
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If you're suggesting people meeting up in VR (using their avatars or whatever), then still no. Yes, interesting, but no, not the real thing. There's something to human-human interaction that you simply cannot reproduce with VR that's less advanced as what they have in the Matrix.
Think of a party. (I know, we're on slashdot, so just pretend you have ever been to one). Sure I could (if the technology was there) simply stay at home, meet up with my VR buddies on a VR dancefloor, tune the VR to try and repr
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You have no clue. But don't feel bad just because you can't afford expensive toys, you probably wouldn't enjoy them anyway. Right?
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You want full-vision, HD-or-above, miniature displays that are self-powered, wireless, and involve no glasses or anything else on you? And probably are selectively transparent?
Welcome to "bio-implants", using tech only available 50 years from now. When you can convince granny to do that to check her email, give us a shout.
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Technically they didn't. The extra billion was not cap-ex, but payroll and bonuses. That could have been disclosed to investors very easily without disclosing they were for oculus.
It would have been on the expenses report, but not last I checked, payroll detail reports don't tell you what projects people are working on, just staffing and costs associated to them.
$10 million per employee? (Score:3)
I am really in the wrong industry...
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Why do you think that any of the 75 employees got anything close to $10M a piece? I'd be surprised if even 1% of that amount made it to the employees.
That line item looks like accounting games to make the company look more valuable to Facebook shareholders.
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Yeah they probably did something like buy a whole bunch of real estate and build a new office building, then claimed they needed to do that for Oculus employee retention reasons.
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Why do you think that any of the 75 employees got anything close to $10M a piece? I'd be surprised if even 1% of that amount made it to the employees.
That line item looks like accounting games to make the company look more valuable to Facebook shareholders.
When accounting "games" amount to 1/3 of the total cost, it tends to question the intelligence and business savvy of the morons buying a bullshit valuation.
Attempts to deny gross stupidity may shine a light on business practices of questionable legality as well.
I wonder if he'd like a do-over (Score:3)
Unless this was done just as a massive tax-writeoff, then I bet Zuckerberg is kicking himself for it now. There's no way Oculus is worth 3 billion now.
A string of over-greedy and shortsighted decisions by Oculus management (presumably the new people put in place by Zuckerberg after the purchase) totally devalued the product and company. Mostly thanks to marketing strategies such as drivers including always-on spying, making it a closed/DRM'd windows-only platform and store, and also totally underestimating the value of roomscale, In like 6 months Rift went from being the next big thing to a relatively dead duck compared to Steam/HTC Vive.
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I used to love Atari stuff. Their 8 bit computers were WAY ahead of their time.. I remember my mind being blown when I saw Space Raiders at some expo back in the day. I struggled to get the money to buy an Atari 400 and my first significant programming experiences were all from it. I've lost track of exactly what Atari has become and who really owns it. Sadly wikipedia just seems to show its all been split up into tiny parts, all owned by a bunch of different shell companies, with no employees or real asset
$3,000,000,000 (Score:2)
That explains it (Score:1)
I wondered what the long face was about.