Antitrust case hears how tech titans carved up the $160 billion search ad market

Microsoft was willing to invest billions in a loss-making deal because it would give Bing a monumental growth hack, but they lost to Google anyway...

The antitrust trial has heard how the CEO titans of Apple and Microsoft met personally to negotiate a multi-billion-dollar deal for Bing to be Safari’s default search before the deal ended up going to Google.

Microsoft VP of biz dev Jon Tinter told the case that Microsoft was willing to invest billions in a loss-making deal because it would give Bing a monumental growth hack.

The court heard has heard that Bing has struggled to win more than 3% of the $160 billion market, compared to Google’s dominant 91%.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella and Apple’s Tim Cook met personally to discuss the terms, Bloomberg reported.

“In the short term it would have been highly negative (for Microsoft),” Tinter testified. “We told the board that we were thinking about making a multi-billion negative investment to support this.”

Microsoft also tried to persuade Samsung to use Bing on its smartphones but failed there too. “Even if the economics were superior in working with Microsoft, they would not move off Googl…