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Good morning and welcome to the 3rd annual Wall Street Oscars! It’s been a huge year for M&A with over $3 trillion of deals announced, including some massive M&A deals (one over $100 billion) and the largest LBO of all time.
It’s been a wild year in finance, and with that, we’ve landed on the following award categories:
Deal of the year
Buyout of the year
Buysiders Lifetime Achievement Award
Honorable Mentions
We cut IPO of the year this year because well…there wasn’t really any IPO that defined the year in our opinion. M&A defined the year, with equities lagging until Medline popped off at the end of the year.
Thank you all for checking in this year and see you next year for more Buysiders. It’s going to be our best year yet.
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Deal of the Year
2025 was a huge year for M&A, with roughly $3 trillion of deals announced. Four transactions topped $30 billion, with the largest clocking in between $80 billion and $100+ billion, making this one of the biggest M&A years in recent history.
But even in a year with $80+ billion deals, size isn’t everything. There are some deals with good personalities, some deals that have massive synergy figures, and some deals that cost their bankers hours of sleep (and inches of hairline). Every year, it gets harder and harder to pick a deal for deal of the year.
Do we give it to the deal that was the largest enterprise value? Do we give it to the deal that had the most compelling strategic rationale? The deal with the largest synergies? The deal with the most hours sunk into it? Or maybe, it’s the deal that gave us the most headlines?
Without further ado, let’s get into this year’s nominees for Deal of the Year.
This is a brutal choice.
Paramount x Warner Bros isn’t even finalized yet and the deal could still go to Netflix. Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific faces a huge regulatory hurdle, and Kimberly Clark was a fun deal, but nothing exceptional.
And yet…this year’s Deal of the Year is…Paramount x Warner Bros.
Why it Won
This deal quickly became one of the most talked-about M&A situationships of the year.
It sparked a bidding war between Paramount and Netflix that resulted in a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison to cover part of the Paramount purchase price.
Additionally, we are talking about synergies over $6 billion!
This immediately flushed out Netflix’s interest, helped reverse the course of WBD’s share price graph. All of a sudden WBD wasn’t a debt ridden, poorly run company, it was the hottest asset on the market.
This deal is also transformational for Paramount. Paramount’s market cap sits at ~$15 billion, so snagging WBD would be transformational for them (and require more debt than their entire current capital structure). That alone makes this a more interesting deal than Netflix’s offer, who could easily absorb the selected WBD assets.
Even if we’re still in the midst bidding war, Paramount deserves the award for getting the ball rolling on what will be the largest deal of the year.
What this deal showed was that valuation moves away from the models and is truly just what people are willing to pay. While Warner Bros may not have released a movie this year to clock in for best drama, turns out it finds itself right in the middle of the largest M&A drama of the year.
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Buyout of the Year
2025 was expected to be a difficult year for private equity. Fundraising was tight and exits were limited but despite that, the market produced the largest leveraged buyout ever announced.
The Buyout of the Year is, without a doubt the $55 billion take-private of Electronic Arts.
The all-cash transaction was led by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, with PIF rolling its existing 9.9% stake. EA shareholders received $210 per share, representing a roughly 25% premium to the unaffected price.
From a financing perspective, the deal stood apart. It was backed by $36 billion of equity and $20 billion of debt (& $500 million of fees!), with JP Morgan serving as sole underwriter, marking the largest single-bank underwriting commitment in LBO history.
In a year full of over-complicated strategies and PE funds coping with just about every problem in the world, the Buyout of the Year was simply the one that remembered how to play the game.
Buysiders Lifetime Achievement Award
This is a new category we added this year since we saw many finance legends stepping away from their day to day roles. While they may not be reading our newsletter, we hope they will subscribe now that they have more free time in their near retirement.
The nominees for the Buysiders Lifetime Achievement Award are:
Warren Buffet (set to retire at the end of 2025)
Ken Moelis (set to retire from day-to-day advisory work)
Ray Dalio (officially exited control and governance)
While all of these nominees are undoubtedly finance heroes and legends, only one person can take this one.
The winner of the inaugural award is Warren Buffett.
Buffett didn’t outperform; he changed how people think about investing, business quality, and time itself.
In a year full of financial engineering, complex structures, and increasingly crazy valuations, Buffett’s impending exit reminds us that the most powerful strategy in finance has always been the simplest one: buy a great business and hold it.
To quote the Oracle himself: “it’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price”
While the Buffett doesn’t need another award, and certainly not one from a newsletter writer, I am going to give him one anyways. If nothing else, I hope he can at least subscribe, read the newsletter on his way to pick up his McDonald's, and enjoy retirement knowing that he will be missed by all of us on the Street.
Congratulations Mr. Buffett on receiving the inaugural Buysiders Lifetime Achievement Award.
Honorable Mentions
I am just one man, so I cannot cover every deal, though we did cover 70+ deals this year over 26 articles. If you worked really hard on a deal that I couldn’t cover, I appreciate you and your sleepless nights even if your MD doesn’t.
Before getting to the list, an unscripted honorable mention is in order.
In August, while allegedly unplugged and on my honeymoon, I predicted the Netflix x Warner Bros deal (I had almost forgot but cheers to a follower who called it out over the weekend). This prediction was made with no intention of being right, it was a part of my 2025 M&A Wishlist…but yet here we are.
This is not a victory lap, it is a humbling reminder that the world does not stop just because you are on vacation. In moments of relaxation, you can occasionally find nuggets of wisdom you never thought possible.
To Netflix and Warner Bros - I’ll accept a deal toy at a minimum - and to my wife, thank you for your patience.
To all of you, thank you for your continued support throughout this year. I will continue to do my best to deliver as much value to you all as you deliver to shareholders.
If you weren’t able to keep up with all of our articles this year, here are the deals that I thought were worth covering in 2025:
M&A Deals:
Sponsor Backed Deals:
Other Deals:
That officially concludes the 2025 Wall Street Oscars. I wish you all a very happy new year and will see you early in 2026.
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