In 2022 Adobe agreed to pay $20 billion for Figma, a design startup started by a Brown University dropout. Regulators pushed back, the deal died in December 2023, and Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion breakup fee for a company it never got to own. Then Figma went public, jumped 250 percent on day one, and gave most of it back. Here is the full story.
Sources: CNBC and Reuters (July 30, 2025), CNBC and Forbes (July 31, 2025), Adobe and Figma termination announcement (December 18, 2023), CNBC (March 19, 2026), Figma investor release (August 5, 2026), Bloomberg Law (August 6, 2026), Figma Form 10-Q (June 30, 2026), Yahoo Finance FIG data (October 16, 2026).
Photo credits: Dylan Field 2022: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0. Dylan Field 2008: Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0. Peter Thiel: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brown University Van Wickle Gates: Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Berlaymont building: KenSwe72, CC BY 4.0. Adobe World Headquarters: Fastily, CC BY-SA 4.0. New York Stock Exchange: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Adobe, Figma and Google logos: public domain. All via Wikimedia Commons.
Some scenes are illustrative AI generated visuals. No generated faces of named people.
