What Microsoft could get for $40 billion instead of Yahoo!

So this morning the Olympic torch came to SF. Yesterday there were huge protests right outside my apartments. Today the route was supposed to go along the Embarcadero. I was at the Montgomery Muni around 10am and there were copes everywhere, it was crazy. Later they moved the route and messed up where everyone was, go figure.

I was reading a great article on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo this morning. This was the highlight of it and some great figures I think:

Here are a few suggestions for what else Microsoft could get for $40 billion:

• Hire 40,000 engineers, at $100,000 apiece, for a decade
• Acquire Facebook (estimated to have a market value of $15 billion), along with just about any other meaningful social networking site, including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn. There would still be enough money left over to pay some consultants to help with integration.
• Spend eight times more than Google did last year to acquire traffic — and presumably make traffic more pricey for Google, to boot.
• Hire 80 million workers in China to do nothing but click on Microsoft properties and related ads for 10 years.
• Promise a free Big Mac to everyone who clicks on a Microsoft ad — and give away 14 trillion of ‘em.