Verizon has 117,100 employees. They spent $3415 per person. This doesn’t include all the contractors and consultants they have manning their phone lines overseas for a few bucks a day.
Their market cap is 140.25 billion dollars. 0.4 billion is a trivial amount of money compared to all the money already invested in them. Purchasing a company for less than 1% of your valuation to try and make more money seems like an incredibly safe experiment.
One person thinks about big numbers as “why can’t they just give it away so I can have things better.” There’s four billion people out there who have trouble putting food on the table and could never even think about seeing a quality of life that even the homeless have in the US. Dividing that 400 million up wouldn’t do much of anything for them.
Even if you take 40% of americans (132,760,000) and hand out 400 million dollars that’s only $3 per person.