Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick Talks M&A
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We begin this out with stocks slightly lower following the biggest slide in three months as investors search for direction. The Morgan Stanley Chairman and CEO Ted Pig has seen it all and he joins us now for more. Ted, good to see you. Guys, thanks for having me. Electric moment. You must be feeling good. I'm feeling pretty good. You're not going to be in this speech in about 28 minutes time? Going to avoid that? Yeah, I'll be with you guys. Let's talk about how things are set up for 26. We've drawn a big distinction between the energy that's coming from European officials and the emotion they have about a place like Greenland and the optimism that people have for the broader U.S. economy, particularly from bankers regarding the pipeline and the amount of debt issuance we've seen over the past few months, the debt underwriting that you've really benefited from that's going to fund a lot of the transition.
How amped up are you about the year ahead?
Well, thanks for having me, guys. Great to see you. I'm pretty amped up. You know, we had several years where the M&A activity was going to get going, and then COVID happened, and then rates roofed, and it's taken a while for it to unglue. But this kind of, in this case, literal noise speaks to a C-suite need to act, whether it's to reglobalize or reorient where your operations are, who you want to do business with. And as long as there's activity, we're busy. So cross-border M&A, large-cap M&A, going to be important. AI acts as an accelerant to that too. If you want to actually get after their productivity gains and embed it in AI, you have to have the wherewithal to do it. And if your market cap is 30 or 40 billion, that's tough.
How do you take a couple points off your income statement to do that year after year? But if you're two, 300 billion, maybe you got a shot. So people are thinking bigger. And then the sponsors, as you know, a couple thousand companies that have been sitting there that have billion dollar market caps implied, they need to come. And then very importantly, you have these great companies that have been private. And over the last 15 years, we've seen companies go public to defuse options or effectively be secondaries. You may actually see great companies that are growth companies, some of them in the AI ecosystem that want to go tap capital. So For the investment bank, a great period. And for our wealth manager, leading wealth manager in the U.S.
and the world, you want to allocate your capital efficiently. So very exciting.
Who is Ted Pick and why is he speaking from Davos about dealmaking?
Let's unpack some of those business lines. So let's just pick up on the IPO pipeline, the activity we could see later this year. SpaceX, OpenAI, we're talking about some absolute monsters. You and the team have been historically quite dominant in the tech sector. What are you doing right now to prepare for that moment that might be in our future?
Well, these companies, you bank them for a whole bunch of years and you get to know them. So there's a process, obviously, the formal bake-off process and then the go or no-go decision. But typically, the company has a pretty good idea of what it wants to do ahead of time because it's selected its group.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:58
2
Who is Ted Pick and why is he speaking from Davos about dealmaking?
2:58–4:30
3
How optimistic is Morgan Stanley about M&A and IPO activity in 2026?
4:30–7:59
4
Why does Ted Pick say AI is accelerating larger-scale M&A and strategic deals?
7:59–10:54
5
How is Morgan Stanley preparing for potential mega-IPOs like SpaceX and OpenAI?
10:54–13:51
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Bloomberg Talks
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