Sony could leverage stock options instead of handing over pure cash as well.

Sony could afford Zenimax fairly easily in it's current fiscal position.

I believe Sony has around 33 billion in cash on hand, so yes they could afford to have bought Zenimax but it would take a decent chunk of their cash on hand in contrast to MS who has 136 billion cash on hand; four times as much as what Sony has. Basically, a drop in the bucket for MS and a relatively sizeable amount for Sony. 

Sony, most likely, have this money to invest, but it's a gigantic deal for them, this is money that would impact the entire company, not just playstation... If i'm not mistaken the entire Sony is worth a little under 100 Billions. On the other hand, 7.5 Billion is nothing for Microsoft, that is worth more than 1 trillion. I'm sure Microsoft would put 10 billions, or even more, to buy Bethesda if needed.

In summary, Sony is probably able to buy Zenimax for 7.5Bi, but they made the judgment that it was not worth it. On the other hand, Microsoft care little for such "small investment", that money is not of great impact to them, so... why not.

Agreed, it would have been a much bigger risk for Sony than it is MS is all I'm saying.

The short answer is yes,but it would not be as easy to justify, they would look at it long term and overtime everything being equal it should pay for itself, but to do that they would need to keep it 3rd party, and since that's the case why botherl in MS case the properties staying 3rd party isn't such an issue since it sits well with gamepass and the new xbox business model is why we haven't seen this till now since MS pre game pass would say like Sony why buy when it's on our platform anyway but the pivot toward a service model changed that.

So looking at everything that has happened it's likely that this original rumor started because someone caught wind of the GhostWire & Deathloop timed exclusivity deals and just assumed that Sony was buying them as a whole but the Starfield part of the rumor was just plain wrong. Although it is possible that Sony could have met with Bethesda and asked if they were open to being acquired and the number might have been too high for Sony and they settled for those timed exclusivity deals instead.

I would have loved to see the reaction of Sony when this news broke because it has been confirmed that they were in talks for a Starfield deal just barely one month ago so it seems that Sony were completely in the dark about a potential MS buyout and Bethesda were just stringing them along.

Got it spot on apart from the last part.

I kinda think Microsoft purchased Zenimax just to piss off some people in this thread.

lol

lol I don't want to point any finger but I think this post by DonFerrari was the trigger:

"But every gen we get MS fans to claim MS will use their money to buy the win in that gen, never happened, never will."