How a former Apple executive almost bought BlackBerry

John Sculley spent just about a decade at Apple, serving as the company’s CEO between 1983 and 1993. He is best known as the man who fired Apple founder Steve Jobs before Jobs could have him removed as CEO. Now, Sculley is making headlines as the man who almost bought BlackBerry. According to Bloomberg, Sculley was working with a group of investors who were working together to make a bid for struggling handset maker BlackBerry. “We were pretty confident that we had the funds to be able to do the deal,” said Sculley during s stint on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene. Sculley and his merry band of investors decided to wait for competing offers to surface and watched them closely to see if they would fail. The leading offer came from Prem Watsa of Fairfax Financial Holdings, which abandoned a $4.7 billion buyout offer after they struggled to raise the funds. In the end, nobody got BlackBerry as the company decided not to sell itself off to the highest bidder. BlackBerry confirmed it would pursue a new turnaround plan under the direction of former Sybase chief and now interim CEO John Chen. Watsa will also rejoin BlackBerry’s board of directors and will help guide the future of BlackBerry Sculley told Bloomberg that he was surprised by BlackBerry’s about face and believes the company can be saved under this new leadership Continue reading →

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