Good morning. Andrew here. Breaking: Paramount Skydance just announced that it has revised its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. What’s new: The $40.4 billion portion backed by Larry Ellison is now being personally guaranteed by him, and is no longer in a revocable trust. The move aims to eliminate one of the doubts that the Warner Bros.’ board had about the strength of Paramount’s bid, which played a role in its decision to accept Netflix’s offer. Paramount also raised the termination fee from $5 billion to $5.8 billion if regulators blocked the deal, to match the fee agreed to by Netflix. Elsewhere, Mitt Romney has penned a fascinating opinion piece about raising taxes on the wealthy by ending carried interest and reforming the estate tax. It is worth reading. His ideas to reform the tax code are similar to some of my own that I detailed in a column that you can read here. And this morning, DealBook’s Michael J. de la Merced goes deep on the deals market of the past year, and what next year will look like. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
A bounce-back year for dealsAt the outset of 2025, Wall Street had good reason to dream that it would be a strong year for deal-making. The return of a more business-friendly White House coupled with renewed confidence in corporate boardrooms, the thinking went, would lead to a surge in mergers and initial public offerings. In the end, Wall Street was right. It just took some time. And as 2025 draws to a close on a high for M.&A. and I.P.O.s, corporate America seems ready to keep the party going next year. Media giants, including a company backed by one of the world’s richest men, are dueling over Warner Bros. Discovery. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX, among other privately held start-ups, is weighing a potential blockbuster listing. “We’re ending the year at a high level of confidence and excitement for the M.&A. market heading into 2026,” David Dubner, the chief operating officer for M.&A. at Goldman Sachs, told DealBook. How the year played out Despite those high hopes at the start of the year, transaction activity took a big hit during the spring and summer. Markets were whipsawed by macroeconomic factors, notably the messy rollout of President Trump’s tariff policy, shaking the confidence of corporate leaders. As the impact of those levies became clearer — and corporate America adapted to higher tariffs — corporate boards started feeling more comfortable embarking on risky activities like deals. “Things really exploded in the second half of the year, and to some extent we have caught up to where everyone thought a year ago we would be ending 2025,” said Frank Aquila, a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell who specializes in mergers.
M.&A. Worldwide, about $4.8 trillion worth of transactions was announced in the year, according to Dealogic. That’s the highest volume since the halcyon days of 2021 and the second-best year for deal-making in the past decade. Driving those numbers was a spate of mega-deals. The number of transactions valued at more than $5 billion hit 166, the most since 2021 — but the overall amount of M.&A. announced in 2025 was the lowest in at least a decade. The tech sector dominated activity, commanding more than a fifth of all announced deals, with $1 trillion worth of transactions. (That’s more than double the next best-performing sector, health care.) A return of leveraged buyouts also signaled a recovery in M.&A. Global private equity deal volume hit $1 trillion this year, its highest level since 2021. And the number of transactions reached 7,854, the most in three years.
Advisers say a decline in interest rates helped fuel that comeback. Firms could borrow more cheaply, enabling them to finance deals, while company valuations stabilized. Meanwhile, private equity firms face enormous pressure to invest more money, since they’re sitting on an estimated $2.1 trillion in so-called dry powder, or uninvested capital, according to S&P Global. Their own investors will want to see that mountain of money put to use. The regulatory angle M.&A. advisers said that conditions still looked good for continued deal-making, given that companies feel a need to keep gaining scale. It helps that, in general, antitrust regulators in the Trump administration have signaled that it is more open to M.&A. than their counterparts in the Biden administration. But Wall Street deal makers acknowledged that Washington — including Trump — was still playing an unusually active role in some transactions. Take the feud over Warner Bros. Discovery, in which the president said he would be “involved” in the government’s review of any bid. (This is to say nothing about the administration’s highly unusual moves to take direct stakes in private enterprises like Intel.) That makes the need for companies, especially in some high-profile industries like media and tech, to consider the Washington angle in any deals they pursue. It’s not just whether regulators will block them, some advisers say; as Paramount’s efforts to break up the Warner Bros. Discovery deal with Netflix show, other bidders may use the prospect of antitrust reviews as a weapon, too. “You have to be thoughtful about a deal you want to pursue,” Dubner of Goldman Sachs said. “How might the regulators look at it? How might other market participants look at it?” I.P.O.s The business of taking companies public did well this year, though it wasn’t as exuberant as M.&A. deals. I.P.O.s hit several issues, including turbulent markets in the wake of the Trump tariff rollout and the federal government shutdown affecting the S.E.C., bringing I.P.O. approvals to a virtual halt. Globally, 1,372 companies joined the stock markets, raising $170.6 billion worth of proceeds, according to Dealogic. It was the best year for I.P.O.s since 2022, but was still down sharply from the $606.4 billion raised by offerings in 2021.
As with mergers, tech was by far the most popular sector, claiming 29 percent of the global market for I.P.O.s. Indeed, the biggest offerings were nearly all tech companies, including CoreWeave, the cloud computing provider; Figma, the design software maker; Chime, an online lending services platform; and Circle, an issuer of stablecoins. That said, the biggest I.P.O. of the year did not involve a hot A.I. start-up. It was that of Medline, a medical supplies company that raised nearly $6.3 billion. “Compared to the last few years where only one kind of equity story resonated with the markets, this year the market was receptive to a broader array of sectors and stories,” Arnaud Blanchard, a global head of equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley, said in an interview. Medline’s offering was also important in another way: It may have come as a relief to the private equity industry as well. (The business is owned by a group that includes Carlyle and Blackstone.) It suggests that these firms are able to start selling off their portfolio companies. That means generating real cash returns for their investors and freeing up capital to buy more companies. The outlook for 2026 As 2025 showed, it’s hard to foresee how things may play out next year, given the unpredictable nature of the Trump administration and any number of black swan events. But on balance, deal makers appear confident that, at least for the first six months, 2026 will resemble the back half of 2025:
Metals continue their record run. Silver, gold and copper hit new highs as investors bought the traditional safe-haven assets amid rising geopolitical tensions and bets by Wall Street that the Fed would cut interest rates multiple times next year. But some analysts worry that the rally may signal the start of a new commodities supercycle, in which robust industrial demand drives up prices further, creating a new inflation risk. Oil is also worth watching: The U.S. crackdown on oil tankers moving in and out of Venezuela and Ukrainian attacks on tankers that carry Russian crude have sent global prices higher this morning. “60 Minutes” lands in political hot water again. Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, decided to pull a “60 Minutes” segment that reported on how the Trump administration deported Venezuelans to a “brutal” El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent behind the story, called the decision “a political one.” Weiss defended the move, and CBS News said the report would air at a later date. But the incident could lead to more questions about media companies looking to stay on President Trump’s good side. (Paramount, the CBS parent company embroiled in a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, paid $16 million earlier this year to settle a lawsuit that Trump had brought against “60 Minutes.”) Binance reportedly fails to stop terrorist financing after its settlement with the U.S. The crypto exchange allowed suspicious accounts, some linked to terrorist financing networks, to continue making thousands of transactions, after it had agreed to beef up oversight as part of a $4.3 billion criminal settlement in 2023 with the U.S., according to The Financial Times. Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, in October on his conviction for violating U.S. money laundering laws, though Trump later said: “I don’t know who he is.” Waymo has restored service in San Francisco after a major disruption. The robotaxi firm resumed carrying passengers yesterday afternoon, a day after a blackout had left its self-driving vehicles stalled on city streets, leading to questions about how a single incident could essentially cripple an entire fleet of such vehicles. Pacific Gas & Electric, the power provider, said the blackout, which affected nearly a third of the city, was caused by a fire at a substation. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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