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Greetings! This week's biggest business headlines should convince you: One of the most interesting non-founders in tech or finance is Silver Lake's Egon Durban. First, the under-the-radar tech investor squeezed into the middle of the Trump administration's deal to split TikTok from its Chinese parent company, and at a seemingly bargain-basement price. Today, Silver Lake is said to be nearing a $50 billion take-private of video game maker EA, which would be among the largest ever leveraged buyouts. Durban is delivering deal-making swagger to a private equity industry that has been dulled by the annoying pressures of returning cash to investors and generational transitions. Durban took over as Silver Lake co-CEO in 2019 (alongside Greg Mondre), two decades after Silver Lake was founded. His new role came about a decade after Durban pulled off one of his signature deals, selling Skype to Microsoft for a huge profit. Since he took over the firm, Durban has joined some of the most important boards in tech and media, including self-driving leader Waymo, Abu Dhabi AI company G42, and UFC and WWE owner Endeavor. Silver Lake, which has about $100 billion of assets under management, has profited handsomely by selling VMWare to Broadcom, as well as investing in Airbnb in its pandemic time of need. Silver Lake is in the position to make major deals because it seemingly learned quickly from some of its recent mistakes. The firm invested relatively small checks at the zero-interest-rate peak in startups. It didn't appear to suffer the embarrassing losses of its rivals and it has quickly stepped back from that kind of investing. Durban told the Financial Times last year that it had "eliminated subscale, passive, minority growth investing." What hasn't changed is Durban's relatively low profile, even in an era when other tech investors are doing podcasts and otherwise building their personal brands. That may change, whether Durban likes it or not. There will now be millions of U.S. TikTok users and global video-game customers who should know his name. - President Donald Trump has called on Microsoft to fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, over her ties to the Democratic Party.
- Electronic Arts shares jumped after The Wall Street Journal reported the video game maker could announce a deal to sell itself to investors including Silver Lake, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund as soon as next week.
- ByteDance could get as much as 50% of the profits from TikTok's U.S. business, Bloomberg News reported.
- Anthropic said Friday it has hired Chris Ciauri, a former Google Cloud executive, to lead its international expansion as its new managing director of international.
Check out today's episode of TITV about TikTok U.S.'s shocking $14 billion valuation, the enigma of Mira Murati and the latest on a Google antitrust case. |
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