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

  Robots are no match for American football. The chorus of revolutionary promises about artificial intelligence might lead one to believe that no human activity is safe in an era of silicon smarts. But when it comes to live events – on traditional television, no less — AI can’t beat flesh-and-blood fervor. For the uninitiated, the National Football League broadcast of its championship game, dubbed the Super Bowl, is tantamount to a religious experience for many in the United States. On Sunday, millions gathered to watch the Philadelphia Eagles trounce the Kansas City Chiefs. The draw of the most-watched event

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

Squeezing money-losing but fast-growing software companies for profit is an ideal private equity pitch. Problem is, banks shy from offering return-boosting debt when profit isn’t involved. As Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone close in on one of the year’s largest buyouts, they will likely tap private lenders for loans based on revenue, rather than cash flow. That’s bitten Vista before. This time, though, there are reassuring signs. Vista and Blackstone are discussing a $56-per-share offer for Smartsheet, a developer of collaboration software, Reuters reported on Monday. At nearly $8 billion in equity value, it would be the year’s largest U.S. private equity

Marc Benioff’s taste for expansion turned Salesforce into a $265 billion giant. These same urges also led the software company into a series of ill-advised acquisitions and underperformance, prompting a swarm of activist investors to demand a makeover. A mooted purchase of $11 billion rival Informatica may show whether Benioff has changed his ways. Starboard Value, ValueAct Capital, Third Point, Elliott Investment Management and others had good reason to push for change at Salesforce when they acquired stakes in 2022 and early 2023. The company had spent over $50 billion in five years on questionable deals. Operating margins were a quarter of

The stock-market hype around artificial intelligence turns out to be contagious. SoundHound, a company that makes AI-powered voice assistants for cars and customer-service lines, got a 76% share price boost on Thursday thanks to a newly disclosed investment from $1.8 trillion chipmaker Nvidia. It’s sensible for Nvidia boss Jensen Huang to spread his bets, even if some prove to be duds. But those hoping to ride his company’s coattails in pursuit of AI riches can’t say the same. Until this endorsement from what recently became the United States’ third-most valuable company, things didn’t look so great for SoundHound. Its shares were trading

Mobileye Global got thwacked by the same bullwhip that eventually comes around for all chipmakers. The maker of technology for autonomous-car systems warned on Thursday that its first-quarter revenue would fall to about half what it was around the same time last year because of customer stockpiling, knocking 25% off the company’s market value. Suppliers of semiconductors used in artificial intelligence are unlikely to be immune from similar gluts. Demand for products from Mobileye and its peers will keep rising. The average value of chips in each vehicle averaged $500 in 2020 and is forecast to reach $1,400 apiece in 2028, according to

Investment bankers ordered back to the office in 2023 could just as easily have twiddled their thumbs at home. In 2024, however, they should be able to start accumulating frequent-flyer miles again, as a growing list of deals sketched on paper finally get put into action. The slowdown in M&A activity has darkened the mood of usually chipper financial advisers. Even mega-mergers unveiled by oil giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron in the fourth quarter, worth a combined $113 billion, haven’t boosted spirits much. Globally, companies notched $2.6 trillion of deals by the end of November, putting volume on track for the lowest full-year total

Sam Altman lost his job as OpenAI boss last month in the boardroom coup heard around the world. Four frenzied days later, with support from backer Microsoft and its Chief Executive Satya Nadella, he landed back in the top seat at the artificial intelligence startup. The incident unveiled profound tensions between OpenAI’s safety-driven, not-for-profit parent and the corporate entity it controls. Yet despite the whiplash, there’s a strong argument that the roughly $86 billion valuation OpenAI was seeking in a share sale prior to the ouster remains largely unchanged. OpenAI explicitly tasked its board with putting safety over profit. So it’s

  Sometimes a mud-covered object is a gem. Often, though, it’s just quartz. That’s the issue facing Cisco Systems after it announced on Thursday a $28 billion acquisition of big data and cybersecurity outfit Splunk. The all-cash deal banks on Cisco drumming up growth – and the $215 billion networking giant assumes the risk for executing it. The company run by Chuck Robbins is looking to diversify away from its original business: selling hardware like routers and switches that connect computers and communication networks. Splunk in theory has enough to offer. Its software helps people monitor and search large pools of data.

The semiconductor industry has changed immeasurably since Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016. Yet the British chip designer’s fair value may be in that same ballpark, according to a Breakingviews valuation. SoftBank said on Tuesday it was seeking an equity value of $50 billion to $54 billion as part of the roadshow for Arm’s initial public offering, factoring in shares issued to employees that are yet to vest. When the Japanese conglomerate’s boss Masayoshi Son scooped up the Cambridge-based company seven years ago, he was placing a bet on the so-called Internet of Things, the view that

After 25 years of muscling in on mega-finance, PayPal should benefit from outside help. A six-month CEO search led to Alex Chriss at Intuit to replace retiring Dan Schulman. The $70 billion company’s struggles, and the incoming chief’s credentials, set the stage for a transaction of some sort. PayPal has become the most trusted place, beyond banks, for consumers to store their money, according to research firm Euromonitor. Earlier this month, however, its quarterly results disappointed investors again, sending its stock down another 12% and bringing the decline to 80% since a July 2021 peak. Chriss ought to be able to help in one trouble spot,