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As New Yorkers woke up to intense smog from wildfires in Canada on Tuesday, an unusual merger gripped the attention of dealmakers around town. It wasn’t a classic deal but one that nevertheless linked finance, sports and the business community—the PGA Tour’s merger with LIV, backed by the Saudi PIF which bankrolled a new golf league in 2022. After crying foul and fighting the new competitors, PGA asked for a mulligan.
We at GPP won’t weigh in on the politics but found it noteworthy that it was rolled out like a typical M&A deal: Leak on CNBC, pre-market release discussing how all stakeholders benefit, joint broadcast interviews with the principals, high-profile advisors tick tocks of how the deal came about. Comparing it to a hostile defense the PGA was running is fair. Aggressive rhetoric wrapping the American flag around the PGA, lawsuits claiming anti-trust violations, dueling fight letters. Now, all is forgiven as the parties work to “engender a new era in global golf, for the better,” said PGA Commish Jay Monahan.
Meanwhile, on the Bill Simmons Podcast, tech executive Nathan Hubbard argued LIV offered “a blueprint for how you become an activist shareholder in golf.” This blueprint suggests LIV may have teed up professional tennis as the next target, where earlier this year we learned Bill Ackman and other deep-pocketed investors have been calling for a change in the current revenue structure and better working conditions for players. Sound familiar?
Elsewhere this week, GPP was at the Economic Club of New York event where Apollo CEO Marc Rowan was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. In a room filled with CEOs and business elite, Mr. Rowan was asked a host of questions ranging from recession-watch to the rise of private credit and whether regional banks will be consolidated. Perhaps the biggest headline grabber was Rowan’s assertation that “there is no alpha left in publicly traded markets” and suggested it could make sense to find a way for public investors to invest in private equity and private credit.
In people news, legendary Wall Street dealmaker Rob Kindler hung up his investment banking shoes at Morgan Stanley after 17 years and joined Paul Weiss and one of his proteges, Scott Barshay, as head of the firm’s M&A group.
Have a great weekend,
GPP Team
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