There’s a strong signal for boardrooms coming from the loud noise in Washington: brace for crisis. Senior Trump administration officials inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat, in the latest example of sloppiness with sensitive material. Companies entrust the government with loads of confidential information, too, and the risks of exposure are rising quickly. The U.S. capital is renowned for leaks to advance political agendas, but recent events suggest greater vulnerability to hacking and accidental slips. The Atlantic exposed on Monday that even top-secret information isn’t safe. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others used the commercial messaging

Semantic satiation is the technical term for what happens when a word or phrase loses its meaning from overuse. In the world of M&A, takeover targets shout “undervalued” in response to unwelcome acquisition offers so often that it’s easy for suitors and shareholders to tune it out. Beacon Roofing Supply’s $11 billion sale provides a perfect example of why it happens. CEOs and their advisers would be better served by choosing their words more carefully. QXO is effectively a shell company helmed by dealmaker Brad Jacobs that aims to roll up a building-products behemoth with $50 billion of sales, starting with Beacon.

Google’s yellow-brick road might be a path to nowhere. The search giant on Tuesday agreed to buy cybersecurity platform Wiz for $32 billion. It may help boss Sundar Pichai in his battle for the cloud, but the journey is riddled with potholes. Parent Alphabet is paying in cash to buy the startup backed by Blackstone, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. It was a hard-fought agreement. Back in the middle of last year, the technology goliath offered $23 billion for Wiz, according to the Wall Street Journal, which would already have made it Google’s largest acquisition. Talks collapsed in part over concerns that

Capital-markets bankers started 2025 betting on an initial public offering boom. Now they’re facing a plot twist. Monday’s market selloff and surging volatility may give IPO hopefuls like Klarna, CoreWeave and others pause for thought. The headache for companies and advisers alike is that the wobbles may persist, which could force capital-hungry issuers to go ahead and take the plunge anyway. The year started off well. The S&P 500 Index hit record highs in February. Companies have raised a total of $7.1 billion on U.S. exchanges so far in 2025, the highest year-to-date total since 2021, per LSEG data. But the sentiment

How fast should an Asia-focused bank grow? There’s no right answer, but the long-term number probably ought to be higher than the 3% compound annual revenue increase that analysts are pencilling in for $200 billion HSBC between 2025 and 2027. New CEO Georges Elhedery announced a broadly sensible strategy for the lender on Wednesday, while implicitly acknowledging that the growth question is partly out of his hands. It makes a further valuation boost unlikely. The centrepiece of Elhedery’s announcement was a $1.5 billion annual cost-cut target by 2027, helped by closing bits of its U.S. and European investment bank. The move makes sense, but

Per Franzén is taking charge of EQT at a pivotal moment. The Swedish buyout shop is big, with about $140 billion of fee-paying assets under management, but it’s not in the same league as U.S. giants like Blackstone and KKR. The $40 billion company’s biggest gap lies in the racy world of private credit, which EQT quit several years ago. Franzén’s legacy might be defined by whether he manages to reverse that historic decision. The EQT veteran, who currently runs the firm’s main investing businesses in Europe and North America, will take over in May from boss of six years

The TikTok ban-or-sell drama is an algorithm stuck in a loop. First U.S. President Donald Trump, then his successor Joe Biden, pushed to ban the social media app amid warnings that its ties to China pose a national security threat. Both pulled back from the brink, even if a law mandating its sale or shutdown remains on the books. Now, with Trump back in charge, a long list of mooted, familiar buyers is re-emerging. The simplest way to scroll past this glitch in the feed is to spin TikTok off. Trump has given Chinese parent ByteDance a reprieve to figure

Masayoshi Son may be about to pull off his signature move – doubling down. Having already invested over $1.5 billion into OpenAI, the SoftBank boss could throw another $25 billion into the artificial intelligence company, according to a Financial Times report on Thursday. Previous double dips like WeWork and Uber have yielded distinctly mixed results, but the timing of the Japanese investor’s latest gambit deserves its own level of weird. As recently as last week, OpenAI might have seemed a sensible bet. The group run by Sam Altman, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022 and touted 100 million weekly active users within a year, was in

What is a digital currency worth? If it has President Donald Trump’s name on it, the answer right now is more than $7 billion. Despite years of shouting about a decentralized revolution, it’s a reminder that frothy and baseless memes keep flourishing. Even BlackRock boss Larry Fink, steward of a $60 billion bitcoin ETF, is getting bullish, telling the Davos crowd that the OG cryptocurrency could more than quintuple in value if big sovereign wealth investors pile in. It’s a fine line to be treading. In their 2025 outlook, Goldman Sachs strategists put it bluntly: Bitcoin is “a speculative digital asset more suited to gambling than

The United States is having a senior moment. As the country’s oldest president, at age 82, is followed by the second-oldest, an octogenarian chief executive’s fate will also be decided at the ballot box this week. Dissident investors seeking to oust Air Products and Chemicals boss Seifi Ghasemi are harping on his age to make their case, but it’s the wrong number on which to focus. Ghasemi has helmed the $70 billion supplier of industrial gases since July 2014. He was installed following a push by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, alongside his Pershing Square Capital Management partner Paul Hilal. Now

Wall Street’s investment banking titans closed 2024 on a high. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will most likely announce strong revenue growth in full-year results due Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, as an M&A uptick kept their dealmakers busy. But there’s a hitch: bond-market chaos could slow everything down. Wracked by rising interest rates, a bleak 2022 sliced Goldman’s net earnings roughly in half year-over-year. The slide continued in 2023, and the recovery is only now showing. Analysts expect both Goldman CEO David Solomon and Morgan Stanley boss Ted Pick to turn in a roughly 12% year-over-year bump in net revenue for all of 2024,

Mark Zuckerberg is more interested in the bottom line than the First Amendment. The Meta Platforms boss touted “free expression” as the motivating factor for reversing the company’s policy about moderating posts on Facebook and Instagram and allowing users to monitor themselves instead. Left unsaid was how the decision coincides with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and that TikTok advertisers hang in the balance. Meta’s CEO said on Tuesday that his social media apps would embrace the policy used by Elon Musk’s X, where so-called community members flag contentious or erroneous material. Not all information will go unfiltered, however.