Richard Beattie, a mergers lawyer who helped pioneer private equity takeovers — work that was immortalized in the much-lauded book “Barbarians at the Gate” — and who served in Washington and New York City government, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. His daughter Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen said the cause was…
Yale University’s famed endowment has been trying to offload one of the largest portfolios of private equity investments ever in a single sale, a move that reflects the pressures on both Wall Street and higher education under the Trump administration. The Ivy League school has sought buyers for up to $6 billion in stakes in…
OpenAI is in talks to acquire Windsurf, an A.I.-powered computer programming tool, for around $3 billion, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The acquisition could gain OpenAI thousands of new customers in the tech industry, which is rapidly embracing tools, like Windsurf, that can instantly generate computer code. The potential deal, which would…
In September 2006, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, described what made his social network special. “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends,” he wrote in a company post. Two decades later, that description is at the center of a landmark antitrust trial against Mr. Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, now called Meta, and…
For the past three weeks, the Justice Department and Google have questioned more than two dozen witnesses to try to sway a federal judge’s decision over how to address the company’s illegal monopoly in internet search. On Friday, that hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is expected to conclude. To…
Warren E. Buffett’s approach to investing is deceptively simple. “Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” he once wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, his business conglomerate. This method — known as value investing — had existed long before Mr. Buffett, now 94, began…
The Justice Department laid out its road map on Friday to break up Google’s advertising technology empire, which would be the second request to force the sale of pieces of its business within a year. The government’s comments came during a hearing convened by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the…
A federal judge issued a landmark ruling last year, saying that Google had become a monopolist in internet search. But in a hearing that began last week to figure out how to fix the problem, the emphasis has frequently landed on a different technology, artificial intelligence. In U.S. District Court in Washington last week, a…
Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, told a federal judge on Wednesday that a government proposal to break up the company would hobble the business, as he aimed to stave off drastic changes to fix an illegal monopoly in online search. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled…
Thrive Capital has bet big on artificial intelligence, including emerging giants of the field like OpenAI and Databricks. Now the venture capital firm is taking a different approach: creating and buying companies that it believes can benefit from A.I. — including in industries that seem far more humdrum, such as accounting — and holding on…