… for between 2.6 and 4.1 billion dollars. (The actual price depends on future performance)

That's a minimum of forty million times Skype's forecast earnings this year (371 million times last year's actual earnings!)

I know Ebay is rich (it made $371 million dollars profit last quarter) but for a business that's not that hard to get into and for which Skype does have lots of users but is not in a dominant position in the way that Ebay is for online auctions and which has Google gunning for it… gosh.