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NYU’s Scott Galloway predicted Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition on Recode Decode

Listen to Galloway explain why the $13.7 billion deal makes sense on the latest Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.

You might have been surprised to learn Friday morning that Amazon is buying Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion. One person who was not surprised: Our latest Recode Decode podcast guest Scott Galloway, who predicted this deal in an interview we taped on May 11:

“Everyone looks to Amazon for leadership and I’ve been predicting they were going to go into stores for five years,” Galloway said on the podcast. “I can’t even really legitimately say I’m right, because they don’t have a lot of stores yet. They haven’t found a model that works for them yet.”

“I still believe they’re going to buy a Macy’s, or a Carrefour or something like that,” he added. “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t buy Whole Foods, for example, just because of the urban locations. They could close them down and just turn them into warehouses and I think they could justify the price.”

Galloway, the founder of brand strategy firm L2 and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, tweeted that he was “just lucky” and didn’t actually know that a deal was imminent. But the interview is full of many other insights into companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber and Snapchat; listen to it here:

You can find more episodes of Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Spotify (mobile only), TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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