Headaches be damned—Kimberly-Clark has struck a $48.7 billion deal to purchase Kenvue—the maker of Tylenol and a company spun off from Johnson & Johnson in 2023—in a takeover that would create the second-biggest proprietor of health and wellness products in the world.

Kimberly-Clark is not only a great fake name to use while you’re on vacation: it’s the company responsible for making Huggies and Depend diapers, Kleenex tissues, and Cottonelle toilet paper. By joining forces with Kenvue and its well-known products, like the Johnson’s Baby line and Band-Aid, Kimberly-Clark expects to drive $32 billion in revenue annually.

Legal and political issues abound

While the Trump administration is amenable to mergers and acquisitions, the president in September promoted unfounded claims linking Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism, something Kenvue and many physician groups said research does not support. Tylenol sales, which Morningstar estimates are worth ~$1 billion a year, have since declined sharply.

Plus, Kenvue’s legal troubles are poised to become Kimberly-Clark’s problem if the deal closes as expected in the second half of 2026:

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged in a lawsuit filed last week that the company hid evidence that linked Tylenol to neurodevelopmental disorders. It also claims that Kenvue was created to shield J&J from legal liability over the link, but the New York Times reports that the timeline doesn’t match the influx of lawsuits beginning in 2022 and the initial plan to make Kenvue its own entity in 2021.
• Many lawsuits also claim that the talc formerly used in Johnson’s Baby Powder caused cancer. The terms of the spinoff have largely protected Kenvue in the US, but a similar lawsuit was recently filed in the UK.

Zoom out: Kenvue had been facing activist investor pressure to find a sale—its stock is down nearly 24% YTD even after jumping ~12% yesterday on the news that Kimberly-Clark was paying a 46% premium on its Friday closing price. Kimberly-Clark’s share price, on the other hand, dropped ~14% yesterday.—DL

Trump administration says it will partially fund SNAP benefits this month. With the federal government shutdown on track to become the longest ever tonight, the Trump administration told the Rhode Island federal judge who ordered the continuation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that it would use all of the $4.65 billion from a contingency fund “to cover 50% of eligible households’ current allotments.” It was not immediately clear when the 42 million Americans who use the food assistance program will receive their monthly benefits. Before the judge’s ruling, the USDA had said last month that SNAP benefits would not be paid at all in November, which has not happened during previous shutdowns.

OpenAI and Amazon made a $38 billion cloud deal. The seven-year deal marks the first partnership between the two tech giants. OpenAI bought $38 billion worth of capacity from Amazon Web Services, allowing it to access hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s graphics processing units at Amazon’s data centers. The companies inked the deal less than a week after OpenAI revised its agreement with Microsoft to let OpenAI get more computing resources without first offering the business to Microsoft. It’s much smaller than OpenAI’s $250 billion cloud deal with Microsoft and its $300 billion deal with Oracle, but it still represents a significant new relationship.

Coke doubles down on AI-generated holiday advertising. Coca-Cola, the company whose marketing department cemented the modern image of Santa, released a new AI-generated ad yesterday, even though last year’s attempt evoked more jeers than holiday cheer. In 2024, the company’s AI-made holiday spot prompted backlash, both for its uncanny valley dwelling AI-produced humans, and for the tech’s potential to take jobs away from the creative professionals who would otherwise be creating ad imagery. But it garnered billions of impressions, and the company said this year’s offering—which features animals, not humans—is better.—AR

As New Yorkers head to the polls today to choose their next Rat Czar appointer, the city’s wealthiest inhabitants are facing the probable scenario of self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani winning the mayoralty.

New Yorkers who Uber without a second thought of high net worth, including Bill Ackman and Michael Bloomberg, as well as some wealthy out-of-towners like Alice Walton, poured millions into super PACs opposing Mamdani and backing his top opponent, Andrew Cuomo. (Republican Curtis Sliwa is also in the race.)

Why the moneyed fear Mamdani

Mamdani wants to pay for his proposals like free buses and universal child care by reaching into the city’s deepest pockets:

• Mamdani proposed raising the top municipal income tax rate from 3.9% to 5.9% for New Yorkers making $1+ million per year—of which there were about 35,000 in 2023.
• Many titans of industry are ideologically opposed to his policy wish list, which includes raising corporate taxes, implementing a rent freeze on 1 million apartments, and opening city-run grocery stores.

Some wealthy New Yorkers claim that they’ll leave Mamdani’s NYC, which could hit city coffers, as top 1% earners account for two-fifths of the city’s income tax revenues. President Trump also endorsed Cuomo yesterday, saying that if Mamdani wins he’d be unlikely to send federal funds to NYC “other than the very minimum as required.”

But…Mamdani's tax-the-rich plan might not happen, even if he wins today’s election, since the state legislature—and not the mayor—sets NYC’s income taxes.—SK

America’s favorite stockbroker-turned-lifestyle mogul rereleased her first book, Entertaining, today. Though there’s no new material in the reissue, reheating her own nachos for a new generation should be a piece of cake for Martha Stewart, who allegedly made flan in prison one time.

Why relaunch? Entertaining, originally published in 1982, has been out of print for years, but interest in the 300-recipe compendium that spawned Stewart’s business empire spiked last year, after CNN and Netflix both released documentaries about her. The book’s publisher said it decided to reissue the book (a rare move) after new young fans started elbowing for vintage editions:

• Online resale prices recently ranged from $173 to $311, or $1,700+ for a shrink-wrapped version, according to the New York Times.
• It took five eBay bidding wars for the popular cooking creator Meredith Hayden, aka Wishbone Kitchen, to secure a copy last year, she posted on TikTok.

Two changes: The Entertaining reissue is printed on nicer paper and costs $50, up from $35 originally. But every word is the same, including a dedication to Stewart’s now ex-husband and the use of “Oriental” to refer to Asian cuisine.

New audience: Stewart told the Washington Post that she thinks twenty-somethings will buy the reissue “because I’m cool. Not only can I cook, I hang out with Snoop Dogg and I have gone to jail. I have been through the wringer and come out alive.”—ML

This year’s World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers was one of the most compelling in history, and the ratings for the heart-stopping Game 7 showed that audiences agreed. The Dodgers’ 11-inning, 5–4 victory in the exhilarating/soul-crushing contest (depending on your perspective) on Saturday night had an average of 25.45 million viewers on Fox in preliminary Nielsen ratings.

That’s baseball’s biggest audience since the Astros stole signs and cheated defeated the Dodgers in Game 7 of the 2017 World Series. And once international audiences are included for this year’s Game 7, you can expect an even more jaw-dropping overall total. Game 1 of the 2025 Series had an average of 32.6 million viewers from the US, Canada and Japan, the home country of the Dodgers’ superstar Shohei Ohtani and World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto.—DL