Broadcom in talks to acquire VMware

No proposed purchase price has been disclosed yet by either California company

Broadcom in talks to acquire VMware

Semiconductor manufacturing company Broadcom is working on a deal to acquire cloud computing and Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization technology company VMware, according to reports.

The deal could be announced by Thursday or sooner, reported CNBC.

“A deal for VMWare, which had a $40.3 billion market cap as of Friday’s market close, would rank among the biggest acquisitions in the tech sector, behind Microsoft’s nearly $69 billion current deal to purchase Activision Blizzard and Dell’s $67 billion EMC purchase in 2016,” according to the CNBC report.

However, no proposed purchase price has been disclosed yet.

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San Jose, CA-based Broadcom has made several acquisitions in the past few years. The company acquired the enterprise security division of Symantec in August 2019 for more than $10.7 billion. It also purchased development and security software firm CA Technologies in November 2018 for $18.9 billion, and network switching manufacturer Brocade in November 2016 for nearly $6 billion.

“In particular, they look 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.