Sony announced on Monday that it will acquire video-game maker Bungie, the latest in a recent series of big moves in the gaming industry in which the “game market further consolidates around some of its biggest companies.” The deal, valued at $3.6 billion, brings the creative forces behind Destiny and Halo under Sony’s gaming umbrella - NYTimes and WSJ
The name change was the easy part. Here’s what Facebook becoming Meta looks like from the inside, as Zuck & Co. go all in on the metaverse and the next big thing for the social networking giant - NYTimes
Two days in the black means markets are slowly making up for a dismal start to 2022. While we’re still well below market records hit in late 2021, most on Wall Street anticipate a strong year ahead - NYTimes
Remember activist Bill Ackman’s terrible 4-year pre-pandemic stretch? Firmly in the rearview, thank you very much. Ackman and his Pershing Square Capital firm have managed to ride a pandemic wave to billions in profits and now find themselves back near the fund’s “peak size” - WSJ
Fed officials appear to be laying the groundwork for a quicker pace for rate hikes and balance sheet reductions than the central bank oversaw in the three-year period between 2015 and 2018 as the U.S. slowly emerged from the Great Recession. A range of Fed regional presidents have stressed that the circumstances now—from solid employment to persistent inflation—justify the more aggressive approach - NYTimes and Bloomberg
A massive $16.5 billion deal put together by PE outfits Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. (the private-equity arm of Paul Singer’s Elliott Mgmt Corp.) will see cloud-computing company Citrix Systems Inc. go private. The new owners plan to combine Citrix with “Tibco Software, a Vista portfolio company that provides data-management software for businesses” - WSJ and Law360
Vision Path, the company behind Hubble contact lenses, has reached a deal with the FTC under which it will pay $3.5 million to resolve allegations that it “failed to obtain customers’ prescriptions or to properly verify prescription information and that it substituted Hubble lenses for those actually prescribed to consumers” - NYTimes
The Sackler family is reportedly nearing a deal that would “substantial[ly]” increase its contribution to the existing $4.325 billion already pledged to resolve a broad array of opioid-related claims - Bloomberg
In case that 99% Invisible episode on “Goodnight Moon” left you wanting more (and it should have. So good), we’ve got you covered with this excellent profile of the book’s revolutionary author, Margaret Wise Brown - TheNewYorker
Stay safe, and get boosted,
MDR
