The sale price discussed in this email is $10-30 billion. That seems like a very good price to me considering ByteDance's yearly revenue of $80 billion. Of course most of that revenue isn't from the USA, and we can only guess as to what the profit is from that revenue.
But if we do some extremely rough estimates, assuming that 25% of revenue comes from the USA and that they make a 30% margin, then it would take them 3 - 5 years to recoup the investment assuming 0 growth. Plus, I'm sure they could save on hosting costs by leveraging Azure, and tie the ads in with Bing ads. Obviously these numbers are rough and might be way off.
That seems like a really great value for them. If I were in their shoes, I'd probably offer even more.
I would assume that those lists are internal, but if you look at their acquisition history, it seems like pretty much any company that is profitable and can help them in an area they're involved in, even if indirectly. Look at how they snapped up Mojang (Minecraft) and Activision, which gives them a ton of leverage in gaming. But also Github, which combined with VSCode gives them a ton of leverage in the developer space.
It's pretty incredible to me that this kind of stuff still gets discussed by executives over email in this day and age. Not that this content is particularly scandalous (beyond the fact that they're talking about acquiring Nintendo like it's not a big deal, man they really aren't worried at all about antitrust regulation) but it's extremely candid about their overall strategy and they have to know these emails becoming public record due to discovery in some such lawsuit or hack is a big possibility.
But if we do some extremely rough estimates, assuming that 25% of revenue comes from the USA and that they make a 30% margin, then it would take them 3 - 5 years to recoup the investment assuming 0 growth. Plus, I'm sure they could save on hosting costs by leveraging Azure, and tie the ads in with Bing ads. Obviously these numbers are rough and might be way off.
That seems like a really great value for them. If I were in their shoes, I'd probably offer even more.