10 Biggest Tech Acquisitions in History

7. Google buys Motorola Mobility – $12.5 billion

This is Google’s biggest acquisitions and the most controversial of them all. That’s because it was only a couple of years after the purchase that Google decided to resell Motorola Mobility because it was hemorrhaging money.

First things first, though. Motorola Mobility was created in January 2011 after Motorola Inc. split into two separate companies, with Mobility covering the consumer-oriented products. This includes, phones, cable modems and set-top boxes. By the end of the summer, Google had already arranged to buy the company for a whopping $12.5 billion. As the company announced from the start, Google was interested in the thick portfolio of patents, which come in handy quite often to the always-sued Google.

In January 2014, Google announced that it was selling most of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion, which many considered to mark a pretty heavy loss for Google. Truth be told, however, considering that Google held on to most of the patents, there was little to no loss on its part.

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