This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox. It’s the special purpose acquisition craze meeting the GameStop insanity. On Thursday, Hindenburg Research, the short-selling firm known for flagging issues with electric car company Nikola last year, released […]
Peloton was a risky bet even among venture capitalists. At its core, the company sells a piece of hardware with virtual cycling lessons, a model skeptics say is easily copyable. They aren’t wrong: As Peloton has grown in the pandemic, so have its rivals including NordicTrack and fitness equipment maker Nautilus. Despite the naysayers, Peloton […]
Maybe the real question is, who isn’t raising a blank check company? Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Donald Trump, Wilbur Ross, is backing a blank check company that is seeking to raise some $300 million. While Ross will be CEO, former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow will serve as director. […]
As its core ride-hailing business remains depressed by the pandemic, Uber is making yet another big bet that food delivery will stay as a big part of its business. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to acquire Drizly, a Boston-based maker of an alcohol delivery app, for about $1.1 billion in cash and stock. Uber […]
Good morning. It’s a chilly start to February here in New York, where an extreme nor’easter is expected to dump a foot of snow on the city as temperatures hover in the upper 20s. Similarly, the maelstrom around Robinhood and the so-called memestocks (ahem, GameStop) continued swirling over the weekend. The stock trading app has […]
This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox. Of course it did. Just about every single late-stage company in private markets at the moment has been contacted by a blank-check company looking for a deal. Kicking off […]
Only in 2021. In recent days, Reddit users have driven up shares of much-shorted stocks, especially those of GameStop, a video game retailer. They squeezed hedge funds and enabled massive losses for the likes of Steve Cohen and Dan Sundheim. Now, stock-trading apps such as Robinhood have paused purchases on such shares. “We continuously monitor […]
Ant Financial was set to be the biggest IPO in history last year, before founder Jack Ma’s criticism of the Chinese government in October angered the administration and derailed the offering altogether. Since then, Ma has been scrabbling together his olive branches in the hopes of getting back into regulators’ good graces. And on Wednesday, […]
It was the big closer on Monday: After facing scrutiny for his business dealings with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Apollo Global Management’s Leon Black will step down as CEO in July. An investigation started by Apollo’s Conflicts Committee found that the CEO paid some $158 million to the now deceased Epstein for financial advice […]
It’s hard to understate the buzz around Clubhouse, the social media startup that reached a reported $100 million valuation when it had just 1,500 users. Now some nine months after its launch, the company revealed over the weekend that it had raised another round of funding led again by Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen. While the […]