Posts claiming ‘Microsoft has acquired all divisions of Sony’ are false - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
December 30, 2020
A post is being shared on social media with a claim that Microsoft has acquired all divisions of Sony, including PlayStation, for a figure close to 130 billion dollars. Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Microsoft has acquired all divisions of Sony.
Fact: Neither Microsoft nor Sony has announced about any such acquisition. The news was first published by a Spanish website as a prank, which was later picked up by others and shared as news. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When we searched about the acquisition deal mentioned in the post, no such thing was found to be reported by any reputed international news agency. If any such deal took place, it would have been reported by all the news agencies. Only some online websites like ‘E4M’ and ‘EN24’ have published articles saying that Microsoft has acquired all divisions of Sony. It can be seen that ‘E4M’ has now deleted their article.
In their article, ‘EN24’ has given ‘Microsofters’ (a Spanish website) article as the source. At the end of ‘Microsofters’ article, which was published on 28 December 2020, one can observe that it is written – ‘¡Feliz Día de los Inocentes!’ (Google English Translation – ‘Happy Day of the Innocents’). The ‘Day of the Holy Innocents’ is celebrated on 28 December by playing jokes and pranks to trick friends. So, the article was published to fool people.
Also, Javier Gualix (the author of the article on ‘Microsofters’) has tweeted – ‘Indian media doing fact-check of the April Fool that we published yesterday in @microsofterses’ (translated by Google). The tweets made by him on this issue can be seen here and here.
To sum it up, neither Microsoft nor Sony has announced about any such acquisition. It was just a prank by a Spanish website.