Netflix's big shake-up tops a wild week in business

Friday, October 16, 2026

Bumble’s buyout, Netflix’s shake-up, Reese Witherspoon’s do-over, and a wild week in business

Emma Hinchliffe

Most Powerful Women Editor

Profile

Reese Witherspoon is buying back Hello Sunshine after selling to Blackstone's Candle Media for almost $1 billion.

While my colleagues and I were busy breaking news at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit all week, of course the world decided that this should an extraordinarily busy news week too!

Let’s recap some of what I missed while we were in Santa Barbara:

Bumble is going private in a $1.3 billion deal, down more than 90% from its IPO high of $14 billion. With the take-private deal, founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is leaving her role as CEO (for the second time, this time staying involved as a “close partner”). Bumble’s new leaders will be Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman, the co-CEOs of Ithaca Holdings.
Reese Witherspoon, with the firm Mediawan, is buying back Hello Sunshine, five years after selling it to Blackstone’s Candle Media for more than $900 million. Both Hello Sunshine and Bumble were acquired by Blackstone – and while the deals may have paid off for the firm financially by some measures, neither seems to have found long-term success.
Zola, the weddings platform founded by Shan-Lyn Ma, was just acquired by The Knot. Ma founded Zola more than a decade ago. The deal merges two major players in the wedding tech category.
And yesterday, Netflix ousted its longtime content head Bela Bajaria. Bajaria was No. 35 on the 2026 Most Powerful Women list. She’s been at Netflix for a decade and has been behind such successes as Squid Games and Kpop Demon Hunters. Her replacement is Peter Rice, the former chairman of general entertainment at Disney. Netflix’s stock is down around 40% over the past year, and it just did its biggest round of layoffs since 2022.

A lot can happen while you’re onstage. As we have time to digest everything we learned at the MPW Summit, I’ll have more for you next week, from my interviews with the leaders behind Kalshi, OnlyFans, across women’s sports, and more. Thanks for following along this week – more news below.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.

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