Dr. Dre Beats Sale: Apple May Appoint Senior Positions to Beats Founders Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine; Will Iovine Leave Interscope Records?
Dr. Dre's Beats Sale to Apple has got an added new offer on the table. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple would appoint the co-founders of Beats, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine senior positions in their company as part of the $3-billion-plus purchase. The WSJ also noted that accepting these new opportunities at Apple would mean that Iovine would have to leave his chairman post at Interscope Geffen A&M records.
Dr. Dre's Beats company recently began to transition their staff from its Santa Monica office to a new campus in Culver City. A representative for Beats campus developer, Hackman Capital Partners, tells The Hollywood Reporter that the company has a multiyear lease for more than 100,000 square feet in WorkScapes at the Hayden Tract. This could present the option for Iovine and Dre to contribute while remaining based in L.A. The duo will welcome the inaugural class to the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation this fall.
Beats began as a headphone manufacturer, but in 2012 acquired music-streaming service MOG. The company then received a $500 million cash infusion from Carlyle Group in September and launched Beats Music a few months later, in January this year.
The $3.2 billion deal for Beats will be Apple's largest acquisition to date. Apple also recently launched iTunes Radio.
Apple has an absolutely enormous amount of cash to spend, which now stands at some $150 billion, according to Forbes. When Apple started to accumulate this amount of cash in the last decade, the late CEO Steve Jobs stubbornly refused to spend any of it.
Jobs consistently baffled by to spend his company's money, saying on a conference call in 2010 that "we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry."
However, with new CEO Tim Cook at the helm, it's possible that Apple investors will finally get what they want with acquisitions like Dr. Dre's Beats.
