[rayiner]

What's always blown my mind is Apple's acquisition of PA-Semi for less than $300 million. Apple is so far ahead of other phone makers in CPU performance that I would struggle to name another instance where there was such a big performance gap between competitors in the same market. I'm sure that Apple invested a lot in its chip design team since then, but the initial acquisition cost was tiny compared to the result.

[wtallis]

Their acquisition of Intrinsity (designers of the Apple A4 SoC) may have been even more of a steal, with estimates placing the price somewhere in the $50-150M range.