Fake news alert! Dow Jones sent out a series of false headlines on Tuesday morning (Oct. 10), claiming that Google was buying Apple for the unbelievable bargain price of $9 billion.
According to Finextra, the false Dow Jones stories reported that the incredible deal was sealed by now deceased Steve Jobs in 2010 and “gives each Google shareholder nine shares of Apple stock … Google employees said, “Yay.””
Dow Jones eventually put out a statement saying that the now removed headlines were the result of a “technical error.” It went on to claim that the deal was set to be finalized on Wednesday.
While the $9 billion price tag should have been a red flag to human traders, Apple did briefly see its stock rise to $158 before settling back down to around $156. This could mean that some algos, which make trades based on pre-programmed criteria, were fooled.
Google did announce last month that it will pay $1.1 billion in an acquisition of the Pixel division of HTC Corp, while Apple recently snapped up startup Init.ai in an acqui-hire deal to work on Siri.
In the meantime, this has been a tough week for Dow Jones, with the company also announcing that it suffered a security breach that compromised the account information of current and past subscribers in order to send fraudulent solicitations.
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