Private equity firm to buy Ancestry.com for $1.6B


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Updated: 10/22/2012 9:16 am | Published: 10/22/2012 9:14 am
PROVO, Utah (AP) - The genealogy website Ancestry.com has agreed to be acquired by a group led by European private equity firm Permira Funds in a cash deal they value at about $1.6 billion.

The offered price of $32 per share is a nearly 10 percent premium over Friday's closing price of $29.18.

Ancestry.com says it is a 41 percent premium over its closing price in early June or before reports surfaced that the company had retained a financial advisor for a possible sale.

Ancestry.com says it will remain headquartered in Provo, Utah, and it will continue to focus on investing in content, technology and expanding product offerings in areas like DNA.

CEO Tim Sullivan and Chief Financial Officer Howard Hochhauser will keep a majority of their equity stakes, and Spectrum Equity will remain an investor.

The company expects the deal to close early next year.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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Dennis - 10/22/2012 3:51 PM
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"Ancestry.com says it will remain headquartered in Provo, Utah, and it will continue to focus on investing in content, technology and expanding product offerings in areas like DNA." I wonder if those expanded DNA products will offer proof of Hebrew DNA in the American Indians instead of East Asian DNA, as modern science now proves. Had LDS leaders been able to do that, they wouldn't have had to subtly change the wording of the last sentence in the second paragraph of the Introduction to the Book of Mormon to read that the Lamanites are "AMONG the ancestors of the American Indians" instead of "the PRINCIPAL ancestors" of the same, as it originally stated. The fact of that change was not published and no notice of it was given to the general LDS Church membership. Yet, despite that change, the Book of Mormon publisher still lists the newer version as a first edition. In their own holy temple endowment the character who portrays Lucifer plainly tells "this community" (i.e., LDS patrons) "You can buy anything in this world for money." But apparently, not even the $1.6 billion paid "to buy Ancestry.com" is sufficient to overcome the DNA evidence which conclusively proves the American Indians did not originate in the Middle East around Jerusalem. Whether the descendants of Lehi's tiny numbers might be found AMONG them today (for which claim DNA evidence has yet to be discovered), is largely beside the point considering that recent change to the BOM Introduction. But perhaps if Ancestry.com continues "expanding product offerings in areas like DNA," they'll offer an answer to the Indian DNA question that LDS leaders have been stumbling over for years. They don't even admit that Nephi, himself, considered genealogy merely as "things which are pleasing to the world" thus "things which are not of worth unto the children of men" (1 Nephi 6:1, 5, 6 (1-6)), which seems to explain why the BOM says NOTHING about a need for vicarious temple work on behalf of dead ancestry.
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