Satan Nixes LinkedIn Takeover; ‘Already Soulless’

Five hundred million souls would have gone a long way toward meeting the Devil’s futures quota for the second and third quarters of 2017.

Hades, June 25 – The Prince of Darkness has withdrawn from an agreement to assume control of the professional networking medium LinkedIn after discovering that not a single soul was available for the taking among the network’s half a billion soulless users.

Satan ordered his staff today to commence the legal proceedings necessary to cancel the acquisition, which was scheduled to begin next month. A spokesman for the ruler of the Underworld informed reporters that, never having availed himself of the site himself, Lucifer only found out yesterday that LinkedIn users have no souls, and had initiated steps to terminate the transaction. Five hundred million souls would have gone a long way toward meeting the Devil’s futures quota for the second and third quarters of 2017, and Satan admitted disappointment, but also relief at having made the discovery before finalizing the deal.

“We will have to pay some penalties, but nothing unbearable,” observed Beelzebub. “The key here is due diligence. The vast majority of the lawyers down here in Hell – that is to say, ninety-seven percent of the lawyers who have ever existed – have always been accustomed to overcharging the client, then underperforming, so they either never caught this detail or specifically neglected to report it. It sort of comes with the territory when you’re dealing with those kinds of people. We had to have our own staff of demons oversee this stage of the project, and only because we took that precaution did we even get a hint that acquiring LinkedIn would not increase the souls inventory of our domain by a single one.”

Beelzebub noted that in the wake of acquiring MySpace, Pinterest, and Digg in separate agreements over the last ten years, Satan felt the time had come to make a more ambitious claim on souls, and sought out social networks with an appropriate level of membership. “The clean-cut, wholesome look everyone puts forth on LinkedIn appeared ripe for exploiting,” he explained. “Such public personas seldom stand up to scrutiny. We were looking forward to extorting the souls from many millions of LinkedIn users with tantalizing offers of success and career advancement. But it turns out that one of the membership criteria for LinkedIn is that the user must surrender his or her soul, and that was going to go nowhere.”

If LinkedIn contests the cancellation of the acquisition agreement in court, analysts predict, it might have a difficult time. “Good luck to them finding a judge who’s not already in Satan’s pocket,” remarked legal affairs columnist Adam Liptak of the New York Times.

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