US$44 billion deal and that Twitter would be- come a private company later that year un- der Musk. After closing the deal on 27 October, Musk became the CEO of Twitter, enacting a se- ries of controversial changes to the platform which directly led to the creation of rival Threads. As of July 2023, the company has a negative cash flow. Daimler Benz and Chrysler lost $37 billion The internet does not have a monopoly on bad mergers and acquisitions. In May 1998, the third-largest automaker in the United States – Chrysler – merged with Daimler-Benz for US$37 billion to create a new company named Daim- lerChrysler AG. At the time, it was the largest merger that a US company had seen with a for- eign organisation. Although the merger was advertised as a hori- zontal move between equals, the deal saw Daim- ler executives owning most of the new compa- ny’s shares and implementing a programme of employee meetings and seminars, while some dealerships formerly owned by Daimler refused to sell cars formerly manufactured by Chrysler. In March 2000, Chrysler CEO Bob Eaton stepped down. The Chrysler half of the new company started making losses in 2001, un- til Daimler-Benz sold it to the Cerberus Capital Management Firm for US$7 billion in 2007. Penguin faced an antitrust suit for attempt- ing to acquire Simon & Schuster Consider this the bad merger that wasn’t. Si- mon and Schuster’s parent company Paramount put the book publisher up for sale in 2020. Nine months later, they announced a US$2.2 billion
deal for S&S to merge with Penguin Random House, itself owned by German media organisa- tion Bertelsmann. In November 2021, the United States Depart- ment of Justice filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the deal. They argued that the proposed com- pany would corner over half the publishing mar- ket and leave its competitors each at less than half their size. In an antitrust trial the following year, a judge ruled that the merger would not go ahead; Penguin Random House paid a US$200 million termination fee.
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