[PedroBatista]

That's the script but reality is not exactly as the script says.

There are a lot friend and family members of so-and-so who are "worth" a few million dollars and that money was largely a gift. They largely spend a lot of time pretending to be "founders", "advisors" and "angels" but no, they got lucky.

Not everything is like that, but there's quite a lot of that within the billions of someone else's money's ocean that flushed SF during the last +20 years.

[mvkel]

$125 million dollars. To "help" a friend save face?

When a similar acquisition was made a year ago? And it perfectly aligns with a their stated thesis that texting becomes a CLI in the future?

The more successful an entrepreneur, the more allergic they are to spending money

[Grustaf]

We don't actually know that it is 125 m, that's just hearsay. And we don't know how they were paid, with cash or shares, or something else.

My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.

Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.