Thoughts About the Wordle Acquisition (updated)
I wrote the below post in February 2022, shortly after the New York Times acquired the Wordle game. Since that time, my speculation that the Times was likely getting far more in value than it paid was borne out by its statement a few months later that the “acquisition of Wordle brought tens of millions of folks into our audience, which helped drive a lot of game subscriptions.”
There are those who are addicted to the new online word game, Wordle, and then there are those who gripe about their friends who post their Wordle scores on social media every day. This being a blog about corporate and securities law and transactions, I am not writing to opine on this question, though the fact that I’m mentioning the game at all probably tells you where I stand.
The New York Times recently agreed to acquire Wordle from its Brooklyn-based creator, Josh Wardle, as reported by the, well, New York Times. According to the newspaper/acquiror, the purchase price is “in the low seven figures.” I’m not sure whether that means a million-ish or some amount that is less than $5 million, but in any event, it is a nice payday for Mr. Wardle for a product released just a few months ago.
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The casual reader of the business pages has seen over the past year or so many articles about SPACs, the financial structure du jour, which have actually been around for a while. (I worked on some in the ‘00s.) The acronym stands for Special (or Specified) Purpose Acquisition Company. For those of my readers that are not corporate finance professionals, the way to conceptualize a SPAC is that it’s a private equity fund that is publicly traded. In other words, investors put funds in a newly created entity via an initial public offering (IPO). The entity has no operations other than a plan to acquire an operating company with the IPO funds within the next couple of years, with a management team that is tasked with doing the acquiring. From the perspective of the operating company being acquired, it’s a way to go public, by merging with the already-public SPAC, as an alternative to a traditional IPO. (In a traditional IPO, there is no merger; rather, a bunch of new shares in the private company are sold to the public, and poof, it’s a public company.)
As of December 2, 2020, 
I have found over my 23 years of law practice that, assuming I’ve consumed my usual copious amount of coffee, I can be quite productive and efficient when I get into a flow. When that flow is interrupted – by a phone call, someone popping into my office for a quick question, a car alarm going off, etc. – it can be difficult to get back into the groove. The good news is that a number of workplace trends in recent years have resulted in a general decline in interruptions, leading to more efficient work.