markets

Claire Yubin Oh11h

Universal Music jumps on Pershing Square’s $64 billion merger proposal

Universal Music Group ADRs rose 11% in premarket trading on Tuesday after Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital offered a deal to combine the world’s largest music company with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, with the resulting new company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The proposed transaction purportedly values UMG at a 78% premium to its last closing price, with shareholders receiving €5.05 per share in cash, plus 0.77 shares of the new company for each share of Universal Music held, per Pershing Square’s statement released on Tuesday. Together, the offer estimates UMG to be worth €30.40 per share, or €50 billion ($64 billion) as a whole.

Proposing a corporate shake-up for the record label, Ackman said, “UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction.” According to Pershing Square, those issues include an underutilization of UMG’s balance sheet, uncertainty over what the Bolloré group will do with their 18% stake in the company, and a delay in the US listing of the business. UMG’s shares have slumped more than 30% in the last six months before this morning’s jump.

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Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks eke out gain ahead of tonight’s deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz

Traders were jittery ahead of the looming deadline, while President Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if an agreement is not reached.

Bull with Nose Ring

Anthropic is releasing its new model to select companies to get a head start on cyber defense

Fortune reported that the Claude developer would be doing this in late March.

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei

Stocks sink and oil spikes as traders price in enduring, worsening Mideast war

Stocks and oil are building in more risk premium to deal with the perceived increased probability of a more drawn-out disruption to global energy supplies and shipments.

WH Briefing Iran 4/6/26

markets

Matt Phillips4h

Samsung’s massive Q1 fails to lift Sandisk, other data center plays

Almost all memory stocks slipped Tuesday, despite getting a positive update on the massive flood of money pouring into the sector from the AI build-out, as the potential escalation of the US war with Iran Tuesday evening overshadowed Samsung’s blowout numbers.

Korean chip giant Samsung Electronics reported preliminary Q1 results showing operating profit up by 755% compared to Q1 2025, trouncing pretty elevated expectations for a gain of about 550%.

Samsung is the world’s largest producer of NAND and DRAM chips. Once considered low-value commodity inputs to tech products, NAND and DRAM prices have exploded over the last six months amid a hyperscaler scramble to secure chips that can manage the surfeit of data produced by AI.

The same dynamics have made memory plays like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Micron some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last 12 months.

But other than Seagate Technology Holdings, those stocks were down Tuesday as of 11:15 a.m. ET, as the surge in oil prices and ongoing war with Iran muted much of the AI data center trade excitement. Bellwethers like Nvidia and hyperscalers like Oracle and Meta were struggling early, as were data center input makers like Corning and Coherent, AI power plays like GE Vernova, Vertiv Holdings, and even hard-hat builders of the shells that house all those AI servers.

On the other hand, some so-called optical stocks — makers of fiber-optic connections that quickly shift data between users, hyperscalers, and all around data centers themselves — were up. Lumentum and Arista Networks, two popular optical stocks, were showing resilience.

Samsung flags eightfold jump in quarterly profit as AI chip demand pumps prices

Samsung flags eightfold jump in quarterly profit as AI chip demand pumps prices

Samsung is the world’s largest producer of NAND and DRAM chips. Once considered low-value commodity inputs to tech products, NAND and DRAM prices have exploded over the last six months amid a hyperscaler scramble to secure chips that can manage the surfeit of data produced by AI.

The same dynamics have made memory plays like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Micron some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last 12 months.

But other than Seagate Technology Holdings, those stocks were down Tuesday as of 11:15 a.m. ET, as the surge in oil prices and ongoing war with Iran muted much of the AI data center trade excitement. Bellwethers like Nvidia and hyperscalers like Oracle and Meta were struggling early, as were data center input makers like Corning and Coherent, AI power plays like GE Vernova, Vertiv Holdings, and even hard-hat builders of the shells that house all those AI servers.

On the other hand, some so-called optical stocks — makers of fiber-optic connections that quickly shift data between users, hyperscalers, and all around data centers themselves — were up. Lumentum and Arista Networks, two popular optical stocks, were showing resilience.

markets

Max Knoblauch6h

Paramount surges on bullish options activity, 1 day after $24 billion Gulf backing report

Paramount Skydance shares surged more than 9% shortly after markets opened on Tuesday, on pace for their best day since news that the company had emerged victorious in the Warner Bros. bidding war broke in late February.

The entertainment giant is being propelled by bullish options activity, with about 17,000 call options having changed hands as of 10:03 a.m. ET, already ahead of the 20-day average for a full session.

The market move comes a day after reports that three Gulf sovereign wealth funds would back Paramount’s offer for WBD to the tune of $24 billion. Those working on the deal don’t expect the Gulf funds’ involvement to spark any additional regulatory reviews.

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