Apple acquired Beats Electronics for $3 billion in 2014.
Beats Electronics was founded in 2006 by rapper and producer Dr. Dre and music executive Jimmy Iovine. The company became famous for its brightly styled headphones and for presenting premium audio equipment as a fashion and culture product, not merely as technical hardware.
Apple announced the acquisition in May 2014 and completed it later that year. The reported price was $3 billion, divided into approximately $2.6 billion upfront and $400 million tied to future payments. It was Apple’s largest acquisition at the time and brought Iovine and Dr. Dre into Apple’s orbit.
The deal also strengthened Apple’s ambitions in music. Beats Music, a subscription streaming service launched shortly before the acquisition, provided technology and personnel that helped inform Apple Music, which launched in 2015. The transaction is often confused with a purchase by a rival electronics or technology company, but Samsung, Google, and Microsoft were not the buyers.