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Perplexity’s $34.5 Billion Hail Mary

There are plenty of reasons to be… perplexed by Aravind Srinivas’s unsolicited, all-cash offer for Google Chrome, which is definitely not for sale. But M&A lore is filled with examples of minnows attempting to swallow whales whole—and sometimes they’ve succeeded.

Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas is being hailed in some quarters for the audacity of his bid, which makes for a great headline and asserts the scale of Perplexity’s ambitions, even if it’s something of a Hail Mary. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
August 17, 2025

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You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of Aravind Srinivas, the 31-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Perplexity, who made a totally unsolicited, $34.5 billion all-cash bid last week for Google Chrome. Yes, I’m sure the upstart A.I. search engine company would love to have Chrome and its 3.5 billion monthly users, which would allow Perplexity to leapfrog OpenAI in the industry’s current land grab. But Chrome, which is part of Alphabet’s Google Services division, isn’t even for sale.