It's the second biggest acquisition in 2022
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Broadcom, a San Jose, CA-based semiconductor manufacturing company, has announced it’s purchasing Palo Alto, CA-based cloud services provider VMware.
The cash-and-stock deal is valued at $61 billion, Reuters reported. It’s the second biggest acquisition globally this year, trailing Microsoft’s $68.7 billion buyout of Santa Monica, CA-based video game maker Activision Blizzard.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said the company is seeing that enterprise spending is "on fire,” and buying VMware would give Broadcom access to the software firm's cloud clients and data centers. Broadcom dove headfirst into the software business after it acquired CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in 2018 and Symantec's security division for $10.7 billion in 2019.
CNBC reported earlier this week that the acquisition was possible to go down by Thursday.
“In particular, Broadcom looks for sticky, mission-critical enterprise software with a key focus on large Fortune 500 customers. And recent software stock declines may make such deals easier now,” said AB Bernstein analysts in a note Monday to investors, according to the CNBC report.
The CEO bonus at the 10 top tech companies soared 400% on average between 2020 and 2021, according to data gathered and calculated by Finbold. The highest gainer was Tan Hock Eng (fourth highest-paid tech CEO in 2021) of Broadcom, whose bonuses skyrocketed 1,586%, from $3.6 million to $60.7 million. In 2020, CEOs were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). A CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average in 2020, up 18.9% from data in 2019, according to EPI.
Nearly nine out of 10 (88%) VMware employees are thinking about leaving the company and 84% have interacted with a recruiter in the last month, according to a previous report. In addition to VMware, headhunters seemed to have the most success with their job pitches at Amazon, San Jose, CA-based Cisco, Expedia, SAP and Wayfair – companies whose employees had a higher-than-average response rate than others in Blind’s analysis.
In April, Twitter announced it’s selling to Elon Musk for roughly $44 billion. Following that development, Kayvon Beykpour, head of Twitter’s consumer division, and revenue product lead Bruce Falck are leaving the San Francisco-based company, Reuters reported.
It’s expected to take three to six months for the deal to close, the New York Times reported. Bret Taylor, chair of Twitter's board of directors, stressed that the agreement with Musk prioritized "operating continuity" until the deal was closed, Reuters reported.
