EBay Finally Sells Skype

By Dena Cassella November 20, 2009

EBay has completed its sale of Skype for about $2 billion to an investor group that included the founders of the Internet phone service.

Last week, the online auction site settled a legal skirmish with co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis which allowed the deal to move forward. The settlement gave Skype ownership of critical software that had been licensed from the company they founded, Joltid Ltd.

Ebay said Thursday it sold a 70 percent stake in the company for about $1.9 billion plus $125 million that it will receive at a later date. The company is keeping the remaining 30 percent stake.

The settlement means Zennstrom and Friis get a 14 percent stake in Skype. The investor group, led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz, get 56 percent ownership.

San Jose, Calif.-based Ebay Inc. also purchased senior debt securities worth $50 million to help finance the deal.

Editors' Recommendations

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Haole built. O'ahu grown

Computing

In 2023, Nvidia finally delivered on a promise it made 5 years ago

NVIDIA Unveils GeForce RTX, World’s First Real-Time Ray Tracing GPUs

Let me set the stage. It's August 2018, and Nvidia is taking the stage to show off its next generation of graphics cards that carry a fancy new badge: RTX. It had just come off of the Pascal generation of GPUs, which persist in some PCs even to this day, and with crypto mining dying off at the time, the way was clear for a new generation of Nvidia GPUs to shock the world.

And shock they did, but not quite in the way Nvidia intended. This new generation, which carried with it some significant price increases compared to the GTX days, was built around a cutting-edge feature in the world of real-time graphics: ray tracing. The problem was that none of the cards could do ray tracing particularly well, and there just weren't enough games to support it.

Computing

A major era in MacBook history is finally over

A MacBook Pro 13-inch on a table.

We're living in a golden age for MacBooks.

The MacBook Airs are faster, thinner, and more accessible laptops than ever, while the Pro models have the best display, speakers, keyboard, trackpad, and battery life of any competitive laptop. They're on their A game.

Computing

AMD’s FSR 3 will finally get a chance to shine in Starfield

A man walking into a dusty town on another planet in starfield.

Starfield was mired in controversy on PC both prior to launching and after the game was finally released, but developer Bethesda seems committed to patching it into a better state. The studio has confirmed that the game will receive an update for both Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS 3) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3).

We've known for weeks that DLSS 3 was coming to the game. Bethesda confirmed support about a week after release, following a wave of backlash over the fact that the game exclusively used AMD's FSR 2. The company says DLSS 3 is coming to a Steam Beta update next week, and it will roll out to all PC and Xbox players shortly after.