Microsoft → LinkedIn
Microsoft's largest acquisition until 2022: $26.2bn in cash, $196 a share, for the largest professional network, won against a rival approach from Salesforce and cleared in Europe only on promises not to use Windows and Office to shut out competing networks.
An all-cash purchase at $196 a share, then Microsoft's largest deal, with LinkedIn kept as a separate brand.
- Value
- $26.2B
- Announced
- June 2016
- Completed
- December 2016
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Microsoft (United States)
- Target
- LinkedIn (United States)
Why it mattered
LinkedIn had more than 433 million members and had taken $3bn of revenue in 2015, but in February 2016 its shares fell 43.6% in a single day. Within weeks its chairman and controlling shareholder, Reid Hoffman, and chief executive, Jeff Weiner, were talking to buyers. The merger proxy describes a contest between Microsoft, bidding all cash, and "Party A", offering cash and its own shares; Bloomberg reported that the rival was Salesforce, the leader in customer-relationship software, and Marc Benioff confirmed his company had looked at a deal.
Microsoft opened at $160 a share in May 2016. When both bidders submitted best-and-final offers of $182, LinkedIn's board weighed certainty of value, the volatility of each bidder's shares and the rival's need for its own shareholder vote, and granted Microsoft exclusivity. The rival kept bidding, to a notional $200 in early June, and LinkedIn used that to push Microsoft to $190 and then $196, agreed on 13 June. Microsoft argued that the network belonged beside Office 365 and Dynamics; LinkedIn would keep its brand and independence, and the debt-financed price came with a target of $150m of annual cost savings by 2018.
The European Commission worried that Microsoft could pre-install LinkedIn on Windows and build it into Office while denying rival networks access. It cleared the deal on 6 December 2016 after Microsoft agreed, for five years in the European Economic Area, to let PC makers and users leave LinkedIn out and to keep Office and Microsoft Graph open to competitors. The purchase completed two days later.
What it left behind
LinkedIn kept growing inside Microsoft: revenue reached $13.8bn in 2022 and $19.8bn in the year to June 2026, up 11%, and membership passed one billion in November 2023. Independence proved partial — Weiner handed over to Ryan Roslansky in 2020, and in 2025 Roslansky was also given Microsoft's Office productivity unit. LinkedIn withdrew from China, closing its local social network in October 2021 and its jobs-only replacement in 2023. Activision Blizzard, agreed in 2022, overtook it as Microsoft's largest purchase.
The auction shows how an all-cash bid backed by a controlling shareholder can beat a nominally equal offer in shares — and how a board that keeps the losing bidder's numbers on the table can still extract $14 a share more after exclusivity.