00:00 Speaker A
perplexity is making a bid to acquire Google’s Chrome browser for thirty four and a half billion dollars that’s at least according to reports out there. The AI startup only worth about 18 billion dollars according to its latest funding rounds. So some of the funds would have to come from outside investors, it was an unsolicited offer, and it comes ahead of US antitrust proceedings that could force alphabet to sell the well web browser. It seems like most of the street is not seeing this as terribly realistic, but I want to talk about sort of how this fits into the broader AI landscape. Adam Kovac which is with us now as well chamber progress, CEO and founder Paul Meeks of Freedom Capital markets is still with me as well, and Adam as we look at the AI landscape here. Perplexity is not as much of a household name within AI is this just a marketing move on its part?
01:44 Adam
Yeah, I think their hottest product is publicity. I think these offers keep Wall Street buzzing without them having to spend a dime. You know, one week, uh, we hear that the big tech wants to buy perplexity, the next week they’re kind of swaggering in as a potential buyer back in March. They said they, you know, they were, we’re putting in a bid to uh, to buy tick tock. Tick Tock wasn’t for sale. Uh, I think the press clip is the point, right? As you noted, um, the the value of Chrome is double or more than perplexity’s own value, and the check would be bigger than the balance sheet. I think you’re selling headlines, not buying browsers, but look, I mean I think founders know that swagger can kind of goose valuations, uh, getting their name uttered in the same breath as Chrome kind of signals Big League, right? It sets a higher price uh, for if someone tries to scoop you up, and let’s face it, it kind of worked. We’re here talking about perplexity, aren’t we? Right? So unfortunately for them, it’s not about how valuable their core product is.
03:29 Speaker A
Well, but Paul, you know, when you look at the Chrome situation, the Alphabet situation, um, do you think that they are going to be forced to spin off Chrome? I mean we’ve talked to some analysts who say even if they do, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for Alphabet.
04:02 Paul Meeks
I agree that it won’t necessarily be a bad thing, but I think when you get to the end of the day, I don’t think that the Feds are going to force uh, the divestiture. So this uh, deal or proposed deal by perplexity AI so premature, the other thing that’s going on with perplexity AI, though I do think perplexity AI is a real deal company is it’s rumored that they may sell themselves to Apple. And so you want to crank up the PR machine to drive up your valuation so Apple takes you out at bigger price. So I think that might also be at play here.
