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GameStop submitted a bid to acquire eBay valued at approximately 28 billion dollars, structured as half cash and half stock, with the cash portion requiring GameStop to borrow 20 billion dollars backed by a highly confident letter rather than a binding commitment letter. The highly confident letter is a financing instrument associated with Michael Milken that largely disappeared from mergers and acquisitions practice after being replaced by commitment letters, making its revival here notable. GameStop also lacked sufficient authorized shares to issue the stock portion of the bid at the time the offer was made, and the annual meeting deadline for director nominations had already passed, making a proxy fight impossible for months, leaving the offer structurally incomplete on multiple dimensions.

Matt Levine's interpretation is that the bid functions as a job application, with Ryan Cohen's real goal being to become CEO of eBay rather than to complete a conventional acquisition. Cohen filed a video with the SEC as proxy soliciting materials stating he did not want to be GameStop's CEO and has long admired eBay's business, and his stated qualifications include founding Chewy and partially turning around GameStop. Enthusiasm for Cohen running eBay is concentrated among GameStop shareholders rather than eBay shareholders, and if the takeover attempt fails, GameStop will likely need to sell its 5 percent stake in eBay under awkward circumstances.

Apollo is creating a product called MAPS, Multi-Asset Prime Securities, which packages private credit loans into a pool and sells rated tranches, functioning as a private credit CLO. The structure allows Apollo to issue A-rated securities on roughly the top 85 percent of the pool, sell those to its own insurance company Athene at favorable spreads, and achieve favorable capital treatment, making Apollo a buyer of the highly rated tranches rather than a seller seeking equity upside. One speaker noted the structure is functionally a CLO despite Apollo preferring that comparison over a CDO comparison, and observed that CDOs were also driven by investor demand for yieldy AAA paper.

Apollo also announced daily pricing for private credit expected by end of September, which one speaker interpreted as a step toward building a real trading market. One speaker argued daily pricing models must update based on something observable, likely public market spread movements, which would introduce public market volatility into private credit marks even before a true trading market exists. PIMCO published skepticism that more frequent pricing equals more accurate pricing and proposed greater reliance on third-party valuations and development of a more functional secondary market for private credit assets.

Anthropic published a blog post naming specific platforms including Forge, Hive, and Opendoor, stating that transfers of its stock through SPVs or forward agreements violate transfer restrictions and are void, and directing readers to contact securities regulators if approached with such offers, with OpenAI posting similar language. A secondary concern is that sellers writing forward contracts on shares they claim to own may not actually own those shares, meaning willingness to violate transfer restrictions and willingness to misrepresent ownership may go together. The financial incentive to sue could be large if tens of billions of dollars of stock was invalidly transferred, since clawing it back would reduce dilution for remaining shareholders, but the speakers concluded the likely outcome is that companies issue warning blog posts to deter behavior rather than pursue litigation.

Goldman Sachs president John Waldron described the bank as a human assembly line and said banks have not undergone the automation journey that manufacturing has, while expressing uncertainty about how overall headcount will change as automation increases. Prior technology like Excel increased deal volume enough that headcount in investment banking rose rather than fell, and the same outcome from AI is possible but uncertain.