Lauren Thomas

speaker

120 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Lauren Thomas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · The U.S. Is in Its Big M&A Era. Will It Last? · 17 Aug 2025 podcast

Well, it is kind of ironic because you've got a lot of M&A going on and companies are looking to do deals.

And then at the same time, you see this wave of breakups.

And over time, you can just look at Wall Street and it is very cyclical here.

You'll see a company buy up smaller companies for years and then they become this behemoth.

And then they reach a moment when they're too big and then suddenly pieces of the business are worth more or could be valued at a higher multiple if they were separated from that bigger entity.

So it's almost like a rinse and repeat.

I do think that that's just part of the nature of how these things play out over the years.

You've seen some of these bigger companies lately, like a Honeywell, get to the point where it is so big.

And the stock becomes kind of stagnant.

In the case of Honeywell, they had this aerospace and defense business that was growing really quickly inside of Honeywell.

But it wasn't being valued as it would as a standalone company within the bigger entity.

So they decided to spin it out.

And they also were facing pressure from activists to do so.

Activist investors will often play a role in coming in and pushing for some of those changes.

Yeah.

Now, the Google situation is really unique, too, because, of course, they went out and did a big deal earlier this year.

Now, that deal hasn't closed yet, but they're planning to acquire the cybersecurity company Wiz, which was a big Israeli startup and huge player in the cyberspace.

There are two different things happening here.

While, yes, they're facing this antitrust case for creating a monopoly around

Search, the company has still been able to go out and look and do big M&A.

Showing 21–40 of 120 · page 2 of 6