Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at more than €50bn (£44bn).
Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has offered to buy the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, in a cash and stock deal.
Ackman said in a statement that while the company, which is led by the British-born Sir Lucian Grainge, had done “an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance”, its share price had lagged owing to issues “unrelated to the performance of its music business”.
Shares in UMG, which have been listed in Amsterdam since 2021, have lost more than a quarter of their value in the past year alone.
The company is one of the “big three” record labels, alongside Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Its roster ranges from classical music to stars such as Adele, Drake and Ariana Grande.
Ackman blamed its poor share price performance partly on the delay of UMG’s listing in the US, underutilisation of its balance sheet and uncertainty around the French conglomerate Bolloré Group’s 18% stake in the company.
He also cited a “lack of investor credit” in the company’s valuation of its €2.7bn stake in the music streaming service, Spotify.
Pershing Square, which Ackman set up in 2004, controls more than $26bn in assets. The fund bought a 10% stake in UMG in 2021.
While Ackman said Grainge and his management team had done an “excellent job” at the company, as part of the proposed deal the hedge fund would add Michael Ovitz, a veteran talent agent, as chair, as well as two representatives from Pershing Square to the company’s board.
The deal would also be subject to a “new employment contract and compensation arrangement for Sir Lucian Grainge”, Ackman said in a letter to the board of directors at UMG.
Grainge was paid a package of more than €41m last year. That included a €4.4m base salary and more than €30m in bonuses.
Under the proposed deal, UMG would merge with a blank-cheque company set up by Pershing Square, and then list on the New York Stock Exchange. Shareholders would receive a total of €9.4bn in cash and 0.77 shares in the new company for every Universal share they own. Together, that would represent a 78% premium compared with the company’s closing share price on Thursday, Pershing said.
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Disney and Mediaocean have paired to minimize the headaches of purchasing ad space on the House of Mouse. Even if it does deliver, for some, it points to compression in the media supply chain. A trend that’s been in place for some time, and accelerated by AI in more recent years.
The partnership was announced last week and is scheduled for a Q3 rollout, with the unveiling of Prisma Direct, a new workflow layer within Mediaocean’s Prisma system designed to more directly connect media buyers and publishers through API-driven integrations.
The product enables agencies and brands to execute direct transactions across The Walt Disney Company’s CTV and streaming inventory through a single interface, automating processes that were traditionally fragmented across planning, trafficking, and financial reconciliation.
Furthermore, the technology is built on the same technology that underpins Disney Campaign Manager — the media giant’s self-service ad platform — and the integration also lets buyers access premium inventory, including sponsorships and high-impact placements. Advertisers using Prisma Direct can execute such buys without manual insertion orders or disparate execution tools.
Death of the I/O?
Mediaocean is positioning Prisma Direct as a modernizing tool, removing the need for manual I/Os, a practice that is still widely performed, despite the ad industry’s fondness for trumpeting its modernity, i.e., programmatic or agentic ad buys.
Historically, these transactions have required a patchwork of spreadsheets, PDFs, and manual data entry across multiple systems, resulting in operational inefficiencies and an increased risk of billing discrepancies.
The pitch to buyers is: workflow consolidation and cost reduction. Evidently, Mediaocean’s pitch is made with CFOs in mind, every bit as much as the campaign team with their hands on keyboard. In a press release, it claims to deliver on the above by integrating ordering, activation, analytics, and billing into a single system of record.
For publishers, the model is positioned as a way to increase net revenue by minimizing intermediaries and reducing leakage associated with complex supply chains, i.e., the dreaded “ad tech tax.” In doing so, Mediaocean is effectively positioning Prisma as a central execution layer for direct premium media transactions, rather than solely a planning and reconciliation tool.
According to the duo, the Prisma Direct–Disney integration signals a shift toward workflow consolidation rather than a structural disruption of the supply chain.
Executives with knowledge of the partnership told DIgiday that embedding direct IO execution – and much of the business is still conducted in such a manner, especially in TV land – into Mediaocean’s Prisma streamlines the entire planning, trafficking, and financial reconciliation of a campaign.
However, core ad tech functions, such as decisioning, ad serving, identity, and measurement, remain intact within Disney’s existing systems, with its partnerships with demand-side platforms, etc., still in place.
Mediaocean’s Drew Kane, chief product officer, Prisma, told Digiday that Prisma Direct does not introduce a new bidding or optimization layer, and control remains between buyers and sellers.
“Publisher decisioning remains within existing publisher and partner stacks,” he wrote in an emailed statement. “Prisma Direct focuses on workflow efficiency and accelerating, not replacing, execution or measurement technologies.”
Strategically, this positions Prisma as an orchestration layer for direct buying, reducing operational friction, with Mediaocean’s Kane explaining to Digiday that it was developed based on clear feedback from campaign teams at advertisers, agencies, and TV sellers.
As such, the launch does not amount to disintermediation; rather, it reconfigures the workflow by collapsing manual steps while preserving intermediaries’ roles in execution and optimization.
“More dynamic or open-market programmatic use cases will continue to be served through DSPs [demand-side platforms], and work in concert with direct buys to enable advertisers to reach audiences at the right ad frequency, and with the right outcomes,” added Kane.
Paths to the mouse
As of 2026, Disney has built a multi-path monetization strategy for its streaming and digital inventory — spanning direct sales, programmatic integrations, and self-service tools.
Developments in recent years include DRAX Direct integrations and partnerships with DSPs such as The Trade Desk, Google, and Amazon, reflecting a strategy of consolidating demand through preferred pipes while maintaining optionality.
The latest partnership means Mediaocean’s Prisma will be able to connect directly into Disney’s systems, including its self-service platform, allowing agencies to plan, transact, and manage campaigns more efficiently within their existing workflow.
A sign of things to come?
All of this suggests Disney is trying to blend automation with control, i.e., expanding programmatic access via curated, direct integrations while also investing in its own infrastructure, such as Disney Campaign Manager. Rather, it is concentrating spend through fewer, more controlled access points while expanding automation across direct channels.
However, some wonder if this is just the thin edge of the wedge. By embedding execution capabilities into Mediaocean’s Prisma, the platform could evolve from a system of record into a system of activation, particularly for guaranteed CTV and premium video. As more publishers such as Disney integrate via APIs, this model could establish an alternative set of buying rails that bypass traditional DSP pipes for non-biddable inventory, while also centralizing planning, execution, and financial workflows in a single environment.
Over time, the accumulation of campaign, pacing, and financial data could enable such an outfit to layer in optimization and decisioning capabilities. It will be interesting to see if such conversations come up in this year’s upfront negotiations.
What we’ve heard
“The Trade Desk’s test with Claude code is good; it will appeal to the workflow anarchists.”
– An anonymous source with knowledge of The Trade Desk’s recently leaked campaign tests with the Anthropic-owned LLM offers their assessment.
Numbers to know
What we’ve covered
Spotify’s ad exchange grew its programmatic ad base, but buyers want more
Spotify’s ad exchange more than tripled its programmatic advertiser base in the year since its launch, according to the streamer. The media agencies using it are less effusive.
Publishers see double-digit growth from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, but volatility remains
The Trade Desk is temporarily allowing duplicate bids for publishers integrating with OpenAds, as a sweetener to ease onboarding, with those integrating with OpenPath telling Digiday revenue and yields have been strong over the last six months.
What we’re reading
OpenAI buys tech talk show TBPN in rare move into media
It’s a rare move for the AI model developer, with observers interpreting it as an effort to shape how opinion-makers frame conversations about AI.
OpenAI’s new partner wants to build ads that can chat with you
OpenAI has built on its previously announced relationships with Criteo and The Trade Desk (reportedly), in a tie-up with social media and platform specialist Smartly.
WPP Media launches AI-driven YouTube tool ‘YouTube 5K’
On April 1, WPP Media launched ‘YouTube 5K’ (YT5K), a new AI-powered solution that the media agency says will significantly speed up some of the most time-consuming elements of running campaigns on YouTube.
CIMM is out to prove that all media isn’t equal
A soon-to-be-released paper from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement sets out to demonstrate what most of us have known all along: quality media environments cost money.
Baker McKenzie represented Merit Medical Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: MMSI), a global healthcare technology company, on its acquisition of View Point Medical, Inc., a privately held medical device company based in Carlsbad, California. The aggregate consideration was approximately USD 140 million, including USD 90 million in cash at closing and two deferred payments of USD 25 million each payable on the first and second anniversaries of closing.
The deal expands Merit’s therapeutic oncology portfolio with View Point’s OneMark® Detection Imaging System and OneMark® Tissue Markers, FDA cleared technologies that enhance lesion localization at the time of biopsy and complement Merit’s existing SCOUT® platform.
Led by M&A Partner Lewis Popoff, the team included:
FDA Regulation: Xin Tao and Lois Sheng Liu (Washington, DC)
Tax: Ross Staine (Houston)
Benefits & Executive Compensation: Chris Guldberg (Chicago)
Employment: Kimberly Franko Lower (New York) and Loïc Coutelier (Palo Alto)
Learn more about the transaction: Merit Medical Acquires View Point Medical, Inc.
With more than 2,700 deal practitioners across 40+ jurisdictions, Baker McKenzie has the broadest footprint of any law firm and is recognized for seamlessly executing complex, cross border transactions. The Firm’s Healthcare & Life Sciences group is among the largest globally, drawing on six decades of sector knowledge to provide comprehensive legal services in transactions, regulatory investigations, and disputes across its global network.
Track your investments for FREE with Simply Wall St, the portfolio command center trusted by over 7 million individual investors worldwide.
Director Gregory Mclaughlin and EVP Michelle Bushore recently sold shares of Realty Income, NYSE:O.
Michelle Bushore is expected to leave her role in September 2026, adding a senior leadership change to the insider activity.
These developments follow previously reported updates on new funding and joint ventures at the company.
For a company like Realty Income, NYSE:O, which many investors watch closely for consistency, insider selling combined with an upcoming executive departure tends to draw attention. The stock closed at $61.83, with a return of 7.9% year to date and 23.4% over the past year, alongside a 25.3% return over five years. These figures provide a snapshot of how the market has valued the business over different periods as this governance news emerges.
Insider transactions and leadership changes do not automatically signal a positive or negative outlook, but they are useful context alongside financial results and portfolio updates. As the September 2026 departure approaches, it may be helpful to monitor how Realty Income updates its leadership structure and how it communicates any changes in priorities or capital allocation to shareholders.
Stay updated on the most important news stories for Realty Income by adding it to your watchlist or portfolio. Alternatively, explore our Community to discover new perspectives on Realty Income.
NYSE:O 1-Year Stock Price Chart
See which insiders are buying and buying and selling Realty Income following this latest news.
⚖️ Price vs Analyst Target: At $61.83, the share price sits about 9% below the consensus analyst target of $67.80, within a fairly tight range of views.
✅ Simply Wall St Valuation: Shares are described as trading 42.8% below an estimated fair value, which is a wide discount.
❌ Recent Momentum: The 30 day return of about 4.9% decline signals weak short term momentum as this insider activity hits the news.
There is only one way to know the right time to buy, sell or hold Realty Income. Head to Simply Wall St’s company report for the latest analysis of Realty Income’s fair value.
📊 Insider selling and a planned executive exit add a governance angle to weigh alongside the current discount to estimated fair value and analyst target.
📊 Watch how the board refreshes leadership, any updates to capital allocation and whether the current 5.24% dividend and valuation thesis stay intact.
⚠️ One flagged major risk is that interest payments are not well covered by earnings, which matters for a REIT funding model when leadership changes are in play.
For the full picture including more risks and rewards, check out the complete Realty Income analysis. Alternatively, you can visit the community page for Realty Income to see how other investors believe this latest news will impact the company’s narrative.
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
Companies discussed in this article include O.
Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com
A television station broadcasts a news conference with US President Donald Trump on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, April 6, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
S&P 500 futures were little changed on Monday night as President Donald Trump’s Tuesday deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz approached.
Futures tied to the broad market index were marginally lower. Nasdaq 100 futures were down about 0.2%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 45 points, or 0.1%.
During Monday’s regular session, the S&P 500 rose 0.44%, while the Nasdaq Composite added 0.54%. The blue-chip Dow gained 165.21 points, or 0.36%.
On Monday, Trump reiterated his warning that the U.S. will destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges if the nation does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Trump said in a news conference on Monday that he had decided to extend the deadline to Tuesday because he “thought it was inappropriate the day after Easter.”
“They have ’til tomorrow,” the president said. “Now we’ll see what happens. I can tell you, they’re negotiating, we think in good faith, we’re going to find out. We’re getting the help of some incredible countries that want this to be ended, because it affects them also.”
Axios reported that the U.S., Iran and other mediators were discussing terms to reach a potential 45-day ceasefire that could lead to a permanent end to the war, citing sources with knowledge of the talks. Reuters also reported that that the U.S. and Iran on Monday were reviewing a plan brokered by Pakistan that could end the conflict.
Monday’s market rally seemed to serve as testimony to the optimism investors feel now that the end to the war appears to be near.
“Everybody was betting that it’s going to be short term and I think the market still is, and frankly, I still am too,” Barbara Doran, founder and CEO of BD8 Capital Partners, said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Monday afternoon. “The market will say, ‘OK, it’s going to be over soon,’ and then we can resume where we’re going, which is starting the year very bullish. And now you have also continued fiscal stimulus from the defense spending.”
On Tuesday morning, traders will watch out for preliminary numbers from February’s durable goods orders.
Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.
As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they’ve slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.
“At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech,” said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “And that’s really sad because I love tech.”
The anxiety extends beyond Silicon Valley. Because tech companies are seen as innovators of the corporate world, as they reduce their headcounts – in anticipation of AI efficiency gains, or to prioritize AI investments – the moves could set a precedent for other businesses to make similar cuts.
But even though AI has helped to accelerate coding, analyze large datasets and aid with research, many AI experts say we’re still a long way from AI being able to replace large swaths of the workforce, if it ever can. So what is really going on?
Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Photograph: David Ryder/Getty Images
In interviews over the last month, AI researchers, economists and tech workers said that essentially, we’re all living through an experiment. Over the next few years, tech companies’ experimentation with AI will probably lead to several critical outcomes: more job cuts across industries, unforeseen consequences from overreliance on AI and a fundamentally different model of work.
“The maximum hype you have right now, which is that AI is replacing people, is not true,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies AI. “But it’s also not true that AI will never threaten jobs. It’s going to be complicated.”
Reshaping jobs
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have promised that their generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, will change the way people do their jobs, automating time-consuming tasks and shifting humans to more complex work. Agentic AI, or bots that complete tasks without human intervention, takes that promise further, potentially automating entire roles or business functions.
On the ground floor, tech workers are facing the first phase of the AI experiment, as they’re pushed to use the tech more often. But the outcomes don’t always align with leaders’ expectations.
For technical workers, using AI has become a baseline expectation for employers across the tech industry, said a former Block engineering supervisor who got laid off in February.
AI helps generate code faster, but this makes keeping up with code reviews more difficult, he said. Human reviews are important to think through any potential conflicts the code may have with other parts of the system and spot bugs that AI makes look legitimate, he added.
“Now there’s three times as much code because it’s producing faster,” he said. “We were falling behind on reviews.”
A recently laid off senior user-experience designer at Amazon Web Services, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said his team was experimenting with two internal generative AI tools core to their jobs, both of which were in early testing phases. Neither was fully functional or useful for workers’ jobs yet, he said. So when cuts hit his team, he was surprised and confused.
“It felt like, ‘None of this is ready yet,’” he said. “How is all this work going to get done?”
Amazon employees felt a veiled threat that if they did not use AI, their jobs could be next, he said, echoing earlier reporting from the Guardian that employees say the tech company pressures them to use AI even when it slows them down. Amazon stressed in previous statements that AI use was not mandatory.
As tech companies reduce headcount – in anticipation of AI efficiency gains, or to prioritize AI investments – the moves could set a precedent for other businesses to make similar cuts. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As more tech workplaces center AI and urge employees to embrace it – sometimes that push comes with surveillance and enforcement.
A former worker at Microsoft said when it came to his and his colleagues’ AI use, he had the “feeling of being watched” and felt pressure to “adopt the tech whether we like it or not”. He also requested anonymity for fear of retribution. He felt he could voice concerns about AI at work if it helped protect the company from a bad outcome, but larger societal worries were less welcome.
“I can’t bring up environmental or job concerns,” the worker said. “You don’t want to be known as the person against AI.”
Microsoft said it maintained system‑level oversight of AI usage for security and risk but didn’t use individual usage as a performance metric. The company also said it offered multiple channels for employees to anonymously raise concerns about how the tech was used.
The power of AI
Some companies are already touting the gains they’ve seen from AI. Google, for example, credited AI for 50% of its code in its latest earnings report. Block’s head of engineering, at the company’s November investor day, said 90% of the company’s code submission was authored “partially or fully with AI support”.
However, in its current form, AI is not as capable as some of the hype suggests, said Stephan Rabanser, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University who has co-written a white paper about the reliability of AI agents. While the output of generative tools has been improving over the years, the tech still has problems consistently producing the same correct answer, even when the same prompt is used. That especially gets messy when there are different users or conditions, Rabanser said.
“This is the barrier to job transformation,” he said. “Reliability will be a key limiting factor.”
More companies will probably experience failed AI deployments or problematic results, Rabanser said.
AI systems need huge amounts of data to become even acceptably good at a task, said Stuart Russell, a University of California, Berkeley, professor and an AI researcher, , and high-quality training data is becoming scarce. Often, even when a chatbot lacks the necessary data, it will respond confidently anyway, producing wrong answers that can lead to faulty transactions and deleted databases, he added.
AI also struggles to learn continually and remember what it did previously, Mollick, of Wharton, said. Nevertheless, some companies are already adopting advanced-use cases, relying on AI to write all their code and then shipping those products without human review, despite the risk from AI’s limitations, he said. He called them “dark factories”, since they operate largely without human supervision.
Betting on AI like this is risky. It creates exposure to financial losses, reputational harm, and negative customer or client outcomes, according to AI and business experts.
Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
In some cases, over relying on AI can cause critical consequences far beyond the business. “We don’t want to move fast and break things in high-risk situations, like in healthcare or judicial fields,” Rabanser said. “There are high stakes involved” that in some cases could mean life or death, he added.
The truth behind the cuts
While the drumbeat of companies that say AI will help them do more with less is getting louder, it’s unclear whether AI is actually driving cuts. Some companies may be “AI-washing” layoffs, using the technology as a convenient excuse for a slowing labor market, lagging consumer demand or rising costs, researchers and AI experts said.
Just this week, the prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a bona fide AI booster who has written that “AI will save the world,” said on a podcast that large tech companies were culling workers because they were overstaffed, and “now they all have the silver-bullet excuse: ah, it’s AI.”
“It’s easy to confuse the effects of something like generative AI with a weakening of the labor market,” said Ryan Nunn, director of research at Yale University’s Budget Lab, which researches AI’s impact on jobs. “We really don’t see anything differentially happening with the AI-exposed labor market.”
If a company is struggling financially, saying AI drove cuts definitely makes for a better story, said Thomas Malone, professor of information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
There’s also a long history of overshooting predictions of the impact and adoption rate of new tech, he said. It happened in the dot-com era and with autonomous driving.
“I do think many people are overestimating the rate at which jobs will change,” Malone said about AI projections.
Pinterest recently laid off 15% of its staff members. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
When Pinterest announced an almost 15% cut of its workforce in January, it cited reasons including reallocating resources to teams focused on AI and prioritizing AI‑powered products and capabilities. But a Pinterest employee, who asked for anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the press, said she believed the layoffs were more about fixing the company’s business than anything else.
“While I know that AI was one of the reasons cited, I don’t think it was the real reason,” she said, adding that cuts were related to optimizing operations. “They did a thorough review of the entire business, and what you see now is a sort of leaner, meaner Pinterest.”
Pinterest called this a mischaracterization.
The potential savings and competitive advantages of AI are compelling for Wall Street investors. Headcount reductions can imply greater productivity per employee, which then leads to higher profits, said Joseph Feldman, analyst at Telsey Advisory Group.
After Jack Dorsey, Block’s CEO, connected his company’s layoffs directly to AI productivity gains, the company’s stock price increased by 20%.
But cuts alone don’t always satisfy the market, which is also watching for signs of sustainability, several analysts said. Two weeks after the initial pop in price, Block’s stock was down 6%, signaling that the market recognized the execution risk, said Matthew Coad, analyst at Truist Securities.
“A big part of it is the uncertainty around, ‘Did [Dorsey] cut into bone?’” Coad said, referring to the engineering staff.
And in the day after Oracle’s layoff news, the company’s stock popped up by 7.5%. But the boost was short-lived, as days later the stock had retreated to near pre-layoff levels. Amazon similarly experienced a stock pop after its latest cuts in January, though stock has since dropped in the months following as the market questions its AI spending plans.
Even the markets are trying to make sense of the hype surrounding AI. For those seeking a clear answer on exactly how this tech will transform work and the economy, the answer is yet to be determined. This tech is changing some jobs, but the greater impact will take years to play out.
“We will see changes over the next couple of years as a result of AI,” Mollick said, referring to anticipated improvements in the tech. “It’s already changing programming. So it will change jobs and transform them, but we just don’t know the job consequences yet.”
