Apple confirms that it’s buying Beats even though Dr. Dre made that video

Apple announced today that it will purchase Beats Electronics—the headphone maker and the parent company of the Beats Music streaming service—for $3 billion. It’s confirmation of a deal that had been rumored since The Financial Times reported on it in early May. Beats co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine will become Apple executives in the deal. Speaking to The New York Times, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that adding Dr. Dre and Iovine to his team is “like finding the precise grain of sand on the beach,” but it’s not clear yet what Apple intends to do with the most expensive grain of sand in world history. Significantly, Apple’s press release mentions the Beats Music subsidiary before Beats Electronics, suggesting that the streaming service is Cupertino’s main focus. But in the New York Times interview, Cook took a broader view of the deal, saying, “It’s not one thing that excites us here. It’s the people. It’s the service.”
The three weeks between the initial report of the deal and today’s confirmation allowed speculation among Apple watchers to reach a level of lunacy that would be outlandish for any other company but is familiar territory in the house that Jobs built. One of the more entertaining theories posited that Apple might scuttle a $3 billion deal because Tyrese Gibson posted a video on Facebook in which Dre referred to himself as the “first billionaire in hip-hop”: