Buying Moto burned a lot of karma. Blowing that kind of money hurts, even when you're Google.

I thot the CW was Google broke even by selling the pieces and getting the IP and a bunch of tax write offs.

   ignoring the time value of money
     $12.5B   purchase
   -   3B     cash on hand
   -   1B     tax credits
   -   2.4B   sale of desktop boxes to Arris
   -   2.91B  sale to lenovo
   ==========
       3.19B
       

and google kept patents, etc. Plus there are potentially -- reporting varies -- up to another $.7B/year they kept it of tax offsets I didn't mention, so subtract another $1.4B [1]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/12/22/did-motor...

It wasn't so much the net ~$3B (piffle!) but approximately doubling headcount with the sort of people who got Moto to where it was before they were bought, and having to manage all that in a direction where a sale for $0.25 on the dollar is considered a success ($0.55 if you count the divested bits). It isn't quite as irrational as buying Nokia, but it's right up there. Moto was a big giant messy falling knife.

"I've been in charge of Android for 9.5 years and now I want to go work on robots"?

That's...not even clever?

What a weird response, but I now realize that I wandered into a thread where you were just looking for some tabloid headlines. Carry on!

That was not what happened. Andy Rubin worked on Android since 2003. It's not that unusual to want to work on something else after a decade.