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The latest Sept. 24, 2024 The Justice Department accuses Visa of unfairly stifling competition in debit cards, claiming the company has maintained a monopoly by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks. Read more › More
A roadside chain for more than 50 years, Motel 6 was owned by Blackstone, the private equity giant. Oyo will pay $525 million in an all-cash deal.Motel 6, the budget hotel chain that has lined American highways for decades, will be sold to Oyo, an India-based hotel operator, the companies announced on Friday.Blackstone, the private equity giant and the owner of Motel 6’s parent company, said the transaction would be an all-cash deal for $525 million. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year, and would include the chain’s offshoot hotel brand, Studio 6.Oyo expanded into the United States in 2019, and has recently ramped up efforts to expand further. It currently operates more than 300 hotels domestically. The company, which specializes in budget hotels and proudly describes itself as “a start-up,” had received a large investment from SoftBank. But some troubling incidents in India in recent years raised questions about some of its business practices.Motel 6 was founded in 1962 in Santa Barbara, Calif., and has been an indelible part of Americana for its basic accommodations. The Motel 6 name originally came from the company’s offering of an all-cash $6-a-night rate. Motel 6 and Studio 6 currently have roughly 1,500 hotels across the United States and Canada, Blackstone said.Gautam Swaroop, the chief executive of Oyo International, praised Motel 6’s “strong brand recognition, financial profile and network in the U.S.” He added, “This acquisition is a significant milestone for a start-up company like us to strengthen our international presence.”Blackstone purchased Motel 6 in 2012 for $1.9 billion.“This transaction is a terrific outcome for investors and is the culmination of an ambitious business plan that more than tripled our investors’ capital and generated over $1 billion in profit over our hold period,” Rob Harper, a senior managing director at Blackstone, said in a statement. More
Donald J. Trump, the company’s largest shareholder, has said he won’t sell when a lockup agreement expires on Thursday. But other large investors could.Former President Donald J. Trump and a handful of other investors are finally going to be able to do what they want with shares in the parent company of Truth Social — the social media platform that has become Mr. Trump’s main online megaphone.A lockup agreement that had barred those investors from selling their shares expires at 4 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. The six-month lockup, which applied to all large shareholders of Trump Media & Technology Group, had been in place since the social media company completed its merger with a cash-rich public shell company.In early trading on Thursday, Trump Media’s shares fell 4 percent.Investors have been focused mostly on Mr. Trump’s plans for his stock. Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, said last week that he had no intention of selling his shares. His major stake in the company, 115 million shares, is worth close to $1.8 billion, and his involvement with Truth Social is critical to its future.But other large investors, who collectively control more than 20 million shares, may well begin selling once the lockup expires. They include two contestants from “The Apprentice” who helped start Trump Media and a group of early investors in the shell company that Trump Media merged with in March.Even with Mr. Trump holding tight to his shares, the company’s stock price could slide if those other investors sell. The stock is already down more than 76 percent from its post-merger high six months ago.Here’s how any sizable sale would work, and why it has drawn so much interest.
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Trump Media & Technology Group share price
As of Wednesday, Sept. 18Source: FactSetBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The Observer, first published in 1791, could be bought by Tortoise Media, an outlet founded by a British media veteran that began publishing in 2019.The parent company of The Guardian said on Tuesday that it was in formal talks to sell The Observer, Britain’s oldest surviving Sunday newspaper, to the start-up Tortoise Media.A deal would signal that Guardian Media Group is willing to shed a pillar of the British media landscape — The Observer has run in print since 1791 — as it increasingly focuses on news of worldwide interest, delivered digitally.In an internal memo to employees, leaders of Guardian Media said that Tortoise had approached them with a “compelling” offer to buy The Observer. The approximately 70 employees of the Sunday publication were told about the talks on Tuesday.A final deal could be reached within about three months, according to a person briefed on the talks, who was not authorized to discuss the details publicly. The negotiations are ongoing and may not end in an agreement.For years, The Guardian, which was founded in Manchester in 1821, has sought to establish itself as a global media company. It established a digital U.S. edition in 2007, and has sought to expand aggressively across the Atlantic.Executives at The Guardian said that a deal to sell The Observer, which the company bought in 1993, would allow their company to focus even more on international expansion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
As the Biden administration nears a decision to block the proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel, the debate over national and economic security is being dwarfed by presidential politics.The Biden administration has spent the past three years promoting a policy of “friend-shoring,” which aims to contain China and Russia by forging closer ties with U.S. allies like Europe and Japan.That policy appears to stop at the state lines of Pennsylvania.As the administration nears a decision to block the proposed acquisition of the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, the traditional debate over national security and economic security is being dwarfed by a more powerful force: presidential politics.Legal experts, Wall Street analysts and economists expressed concern about the precedent that would be set if President Biden uses executive power to block a company from an allied nation from buying an American business. They warn that scuttling the $15 billion transaction would be an extraordinary departure from the nation’s culture of open investment — one that could lead international corporations to reconsider their U.S. investments.“This was a purely political decision, and one that stomps on the Biden administration’s stated focus on building alliances among like-minded countries to advance the economic competition with China,” said Christopher B. Johnstone, a senior adviser and the Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “At the end of the day, it represents pure protectionism that draws no apparent distinction between our friends and our adversaries.”Administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, who leads a government panel that is reviewing the steel deal, have espoused the benefits of deepening economic ties with U.S. allies to make supply chains more resilient. Those sentiments are being disregarded in the heat of an election year, where domestic political dynamics take priority.The Biden administration has been under pressure to find a way to justify blocking the Nippon acquisition amid backlash against the deal from the powerful steelworkers’ union. The labor organization believes that Nippon, which has pledged to invest in Pennsylvania factories and preserve jobs, could jeopardize pension agreements and lay off employees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The stock price of the former president’s social media company has often moved in tandem with investor perception of his standing in the presidential race.Shares of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company have fallen so much that his onetime $6 billion stake is now worth about $2 billion.The stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, at about $17.40 a share in early trading on Wednesday, is down more than 70 percent from the high-water mark it hit after Trump Media’s merger in March with a publicly traded shell company.Mr. Trump is the single largest shareholder of Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, owning 115 million shares — a roughly 60 percent stake.The slide in the share price has accelerated over the past few weeks as the presidential campaign has heated up and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has narrowly overtaken Mr. Trump in most national polls. Shares of Trump Media often have risen and fallen in tandem with investor perception of how Mr. Trump is doing in the presidential race.The stock is also falling in advance of a pivotal date — the expiration of a contractual lockup that has precluded Mr. Trump from selling any of his shares. But on Sept. 19, he and other early investors can start selling shares, which could further depress Trump Media’s stock price.Trump Media’s shares are now trading just around the $17.50 price that the shell company it merged with, Digital World Acquisition Corporation, had at the start of the year. In January, investors began buying shares of Digital World in anticipation of the merger’s completion.By the time the merger with Trump Media closed on March 25, Digital World shares had risen to nearly $40, and they peaked two days later above $66. But the shares, even at their current level, still trade at a sky-high valuation given that Trump Media is losing tens of millions of dollars each quarter and Truth Social is taking in meager advertising revenues.Many of Trump Media’s shareholders are individual investors and supporters of the former president who originally bought shares of Digital World after the two companies announced plans to a merger in October 2021. Some bought in when shares of Digital World were trading near $90 in the initial wave of exuberance surrounding the deal. More
Mr. Bronfman had frantically put a bid together over the last week even as Paramount raised questions about his financing.Edgar Bronfman Jr. abandoned his pursuit of Paramount on Monday, dropping his 11th-hour bid roughly a day before the deadline to submit a final offer for the owner of CBS and MTV.Mr. Bronfman’s decision to suspend his bid all but ensures that Paramount will be acquired by Skydance, an up-and-coming Hollywood studio that has spent most of this year courting, cajoling and cudgeling Paramount into a deal. Skydance reached an $8 billion merger agreement in July, but that deal included a “go shop” window that allowed Paramount to seek other buyers.In a statement, Mr. Bronfman said his bidding group had notified a special committee of Paramount’s board of directors Monday that the group would drop its pursuit, adding that it was “a privilege to have the opportunity to participate” in the deal-making process.Mr. Bronfman said in a statement that “Paramount’s best days are ahead.” Mike Blake/Reuters“While there may have been differences, we believe that everyone involved in the sale process is united in the belief that Paramount’s best days are ahead,” Mr. Bronfman said. “We congratulate the Skydance team and thank the special committee and the Redstone family for their engagement during the go-shop process.”Mr. Bronfman said in his statement that Paramount was “an extraordinary company,” calling it “an unrivaled collection of marquee brands, assets and people.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
His bid to buy Paramount pits one son of a billionaire against the son of another.When the media executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. submitted his last-ditch bid on Monday to take control of Paramount, his approach was greeted with surprise and skepticism. Who would take his unconventional coalition of investors seriously, especially when an $8 billion deal with Skydance was on the table?Later in the week, the answer came emphatically: Paramount.The bid has transformed Paramount’s sale into a battle of family dynasties. Skydance’s founder, David Ellison, who is the son of the Oracle founder Larry Ellison, has struck an agreement with Shari Redstone to take over Paramount, a media empire assembled by her father. But the deal is now threatened by the bid from Bronfman — a grandson of the Seagram mogul Samuel Bronfman — whose early foray steering the family business into media several decades ago has left a cloud over his career.Bronfman, no stranger to doubters, somehow corralled billions in commitments for the bid, refined his list of investors and persuaded a special committee of Paramount’s board of directors to extend the “go shop” window in the company’s agreement with Skydance in order to consider it.The son of one billionaire is now pitted against the son of another.“He’s been craving a media empire since the 1980s, and Paramount is a great studio with a lot of upside potential,” Terry Kawaja, the founder of Luma Partners, a boutique bank, said of Bronfman.“If you’re the billionaire son of a billionaire, it’s the ultimate asset.”Across Wall Street and Hollywood, Bronfman is a polarizing figure. Depending on whom you ask, he’s either the hapless heir who steered Seagrams into a catastrophic merger with Vivendi in 2000 or the misunderstood mogul who fought his way back from a bad deal to prove his mettle with success at Warner Music Group.Bronfman’s résumé is further complicated by a conviction for insider trading in 2011 under French law, which resulted in a $6.8 million fine and a 15-month suspended sentence. At the time of his conviction, he said his trades were aboveboard.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
