Bono Breaks Even on Palm Sale
Palm's newly-announced $1.2 billion sale to Hewlett Packard is great news for Bono: It means the U2 frontman's Elevation Partners roughly broke even on its 2007 investment in Palm. No loss! Who's the "Worst Investor in America" now, mate?
Palm, you'll recall, is the Apple-aping maker of smartphones, whose last-ditch bid for relevance, the Pre, died because it was too difficult and unrewarding to develop apps for the thing. The company's stock has been cut in half over the past year, and there was a real chance that, without a white-knight buyer like HP, the company could have died, taking Elevation and Bono's highest-profile investment down with it. Now Bono, dubbed America's worst investor by the investing website 24/7 Wall Street, just needs to find people who can similarly rescue Forbes and Yelp, two of his other disastrous investments.