Inside the Biggest M&A Deals You Need to Know (NextEra, Dominion, Magnum Ice Cream, UK Takeovers Up 250%)

Hello and welcome back to the market maker podcast and we're going to talk all things M&A deals and last week we saw Goldman Sachs is CEO David Solomon slide into Elon Musk is DMs during a bit to lead space X's record breaking IPO and Sam Altman when his court battle case against Elon but we're going to decide to go to a little bit old school going to cover some good old fashioned deals Steven's even donning is Gillette for talking about the deals which I have pulled this chain a little bit before we start hit the record button but he's all set to go and it's a familiar format for any of our regular listeners but for those new five stories in five minutes for each one so we're going to talk next year energies acquisition of dominion a P.E. Giants circling Magnum ice creams which I'm sure a lot will get consumed if you're part of the UK bank holiday weekend and you looked at the weather app. And then ECO labs bond issuance for his acquisition of cool it and why London M&A bankers have a big smile on their faces maybe not so happy over in Japan though and then finally a tiktokker trying to buy spirit airlines. First the before we begin quick shout out for all of the submissions we've had for our research or all Steven we've had so many I did go through them all this week and I'm going to connect you with two of them. So for everyone else if you don't hear from us by the end of this week then for one thank you so much for reaching out listening to the pod really appreciate it if you don't hear from us then it means not quite lucky this time but I'm sure have a need for more in the future. Let's dive in next year to buy dominion for 67 billion dollars to form a power giant in fact the largest us power sector merger. I read on record pending regulatory reviews so I guess the stuff on the top who are these companies Steven. Yeah absolutely this is this is a massive deal this was last week's biggest deal but probably I'm at a in the top three maybe in the top two. Global deal so far this year and it's really interesting for a number of strategic reasons that we'll get into but next year for anyone that's not aware and again we're a UK based podcast these are us based power and utilities companies next year is a 200 billion market cap utility provider. Based out of Florida it has made an absolute storm through the market cap through the share price growth due to its investment its division that the focus is more on green energy renewable energy. And it's well loved by the AI hyper scalers and things like that so next year is kind of shot ahead because it's renewable energy. Division has gone you know has grown so quickly but it's utility but relatively it's utility division like it's bricks and mortar it's kind of run of the mill. You know normal boring business has become a much much smaller part of next year's overall business so you've got the kind of exciting sexy bit and then you've got the power utilities bit that just services people's homes now. Along comes dominion dominion is a boring utilities business it serves 3.6 million homes and businesses in Virginia North Carolina and South Carolina and it provides natural gas for 500,000 customers across South Carolina. It's also powering a lot of what is called data center alley in Virginia alley being the alleyway not a name which I got confused about when I first heard it's not not data center alley the person. So the reason one of the main reasons why next era is acquiring dominion obviously there's all this strategic rationale will talk about the AI build out. But quite interestingly next era is you know it issues bonds and it has a credit rating and it's credit rating is investment grade which is good. But credit rating agencies absolutely love utilities right because there is locked in stable reasonable margin revenue it's just such an easy business model to give investment grade credit rating to. Credit rating agencies don't like more speculative or you know even fast growing exciting but you know we're not exactly sure where the revenues going to come from are we too exposed to potentially a AI power consumption bubble etc so there was a threat. To next era that it would lose its investment grade credit rating will certainly get the credit rating downgraded because utilities part such a small fraction now so I had two options right it could either get rid of its high growth renewables division or it could buy utilities providers to kind of re to rebalance the books so that the credit rate ratings agencies can go. Okay good this is a utilities company there's also got some stardust sprinkled around the side so I get that rationale then so how would you approach the the same 67 billion because if that's just like a bolt onto strength and then the validity in the eyes of the credit rating agencies i'm sure you're not just chucking cash at this. Yeah absolutely so this you know this is 76 dollars per share it's a you know it's cash in its cash and shares 23% premium based on fried last Friday's closing stock prices and it's a you know it's a 15 times EV EBITDA valuation 3.3 times price to sales so it's one of those acquisitions that you know it's not speculative it's not. Blockbuster multiples it's something that you know I am absolutely sure the next era have been speaking at length of the credit rating agencies going if we do this deal you know is this going to look okay and bearing in mind what's also worth saying about these utilities companies is. They're debt to EBITDA's tend to be very very high utilities massive massive infrastructure huge huge infrastructure debt burdens 2030 years out into the future some of this debt and so Dominions got a 6.5 times debt to EBITDA. Ratio which is really really high so again when we think about the credit rating we're having to think about okay yes we're bringing in a load of really solid cash flow really really nice stuff for the credit rating agencies but we're also piling some more debt onto next era and again this all goes into the calculations movies will come out and say you know this is. Positive you know we will have a positive outlook for next era if this deal goes through we will have a neutral outlook or we will have a negative outlook and obviously that's the thing that we're we're kind of waiting on there's a load of other reasons why you do this transaction but that's that's quite a big one. And I was just looking at the investment banking scorecard and you mentioned there that's one of the biggest deals of the year and in fact is the second. Obviously pending it all going through the top one was Amazon I think this is when they were taking a 14% slice of open AI that's the biggest but this next year is the second so who are the banks involved. In running this one then I'm assuming there's many but who are the leads. So las are the storied investment bank pure play investment bank is this is the solid visor to the next era. And then Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are advising dominion will go and talk about the league tables a little bit later on but again. I want to reference Nicholas Campanella who's an analyst at Barclays and he was talking about this consolidation of big utilities providers big power providers in response to the increase AI related demand you know the real. You know wait that is going into this grid the demand that's going into the grid at the moment and he says Nicholas Campanella if it's going to happen and the deals going to get done and close then it's game on. But it's a happen anywhere across the country this is going to be a feeding frenzy frenzy for emanate bankers you will see utilities linking up with each other adding you know adding capability adding capacity all in order to in all in order to just get get ahead of this. This power demand that is coming you know from from the AI build out. Interesting you mentioned lasard there i was just thinking yeah on that mna advisor ranking. Year to date actually the biggest mover compared to 2025 so they're currently in sixth spot globally and they were 10th. This time last year so outperforming at the moment the top the podium at the moment looks as it always looks G. S. J. P. M. S. one two three as it was this time last year bank from America's actually jumped to fourth from sixth cities dropped one. Yes but one thing them I was talking to you just before we started the recording that just brought on this topic. I remember talking it must have only been to a month ago or so and we were looking at this kind of geographic global map where it has all the different areas like Australia. US, Europe, Middle East, and it has the percentage of deal values that are happening in the M&A advisory space. We were talking about how great it was looking in Japan and everywhere else was kind of being dragged along, kind of just at the zero type levels, if not some negative. I had a look at it this morning and it's just flipped on its head. The world, ex-Japan and Asia in particular seems to be on fire at the moment. What's happened there? What's the turnaround story from a geographic perspective that's led to Asia being down 40% whereas the Americas are up 52 and Europe's up 75%. Yeah, it's a really interesting one, isn't it? Again, it's partly not necessarily vibes, but it's partly where the focus of attention lands within a particular year. Depending on the fundamentals and Japan, there wasn't a lot of deals to be done elsewhere. So Japan got a lot of focus, got a lot of dollar, got a lot of advisory interest, and there was a, we spoke about it at length, the private equity involvement in Japan, lots of companies being available, the breakup of conglomerates, etc. But now, again, it's game on for the rest of the world. We'll talk a little bit about Europe later on in the podcast. We'll talk a little bit about UK and valuations, but obviously the US, it's boom time. Everything is trickling down and then pulling back up from this AI build out. It is not just, it's so interesting to see the shape of and you guys covered on your podcast the shape of earnings across the S&P 500 because you've got obviously the hyperscalers and the Mag 7, you know, spending trillions of dollars on this AI build out. That trickles all the way down through industrial power, utilities, infrastructure, services. You know, they all get a little bit of the money, which encourages acquisitions and consolidations and a desire for scale in order to match the demand. And then obviously the thing that is yet to be proved out, but if it is proven out then, again, it's, you know, it's game on and it's not a bubble, it's reality is, all right, is this trickling through into massive, massive productivity unlocks in the service part, you know, in the service element of the S&P 500. So we've, you know, we've got the, the Mag 7 going ballistic. Just bringing up all of the infrastructure, logistics, energy, everything like that. So the S&P's doing pretty well. It's just whether we can get the other bits to kind of see, reap the rewards of all of this spend. That's going to be interesting. But yeah, I mean, you know, I think what's interesting is as a bystander who perhaps isn't involved in the financial markets day today, you'd be remiss for thinking like the world's forming a part of the moment, there's multiple conflicts that are occurring, inflation's going up, consumer sentiment is decreasing because of price pressures. And then here we are earnings are blockbuster on Wall Street and M&A deal making is thriving at the moment. It's quite an interesting contrast. It's a super interesting contrast. And again, we are just going to have to see whether the proof is in the pudding and that is productivity unlocks in the back ends of US, you know, Inc. And it's very, and again, there's the superficiality of artificial intelligence, which is, you know, chat GPT and creating funny images and things like that. But then there's like the hard work of totally transforming middle offices and back offices, which is, you know, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars for major corporations. And that's the thing that everyone's really, really looking out for and going, all right, you know, what's actually going on in the world of productivity beyond the kind of superficiality of the headlines and musk versus altmen and things like that. All right. Well, let's move on and talk a little bit about private equity in ice creams. And I'm going to start with the first most important question, Stephen. I've got to pick one for this sunny weekend. Are you going to go magnum, Ben and Jerry's, wool's ice cream or a cornetto? Yeah, it's a very good question. I think Ben and Jerry's, Ben and Jerry's, to me, is always like the indulgent, like evening, I'm watching a film and how have I managed to get through a whole pot by myself kind of vibe, right? It's, you know, I rarely eat it on like a Sunday afternoon. It definitely feels sick after I've eaten it. I would say at a magnum kind of, you get the right flavour, you're all right. On a sunny day, I'm a cornetto, man. And there is nothing better for the, for the, for the lover of a cornetto, there is absolutely nothing better than that little bit of chocolate at the bottom of a cornetto. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's just that it's just that little gift, that little gift at the end. It's the greatest unlock of childhood right there. It's fantastic. And then I realise, I think my parents started buying kind of saints rezone or whatever and they didn't have the bit of chocolate at the bottom and I just chucked on the floor. It wasn't happy. Anyway, the story. Private Army in the headline here is Private Equity Circles Magnum as ice cream giant shares sag. So this is a story that we've covered before and, and, you know, it all goes back to Unilever. Unilever, this big sprawling conglomerate with lots of different divisions, everything from dove, you know, antiperspirant all the way through to sources and, and, and ice cream as well. They have been, you know, Unilever's been struggling for a very long time and a, and their strategy has been, all right, let's get rid of divisions that we think can stand alone that doesn't have a great deal of synergies with the other divisions within Unilever. So it's already, you know, been talking about its, its, you know, hygiene and, and antiperspirant division. The big one that was spun out, demurged, and there's a specific reason why I'm talking about it being demurged. And we'll talk about that in a second. Now it's to a demurger IPO is Magnum Ice Cream and this happened as recently as December last year, right? So the IPO didn't December Magnum Ice Cream. Again, I'll talk about the share structure in a second. And ever since the IPO, you know, the hope was this is going to be a decent standalone company you want that day one share price pop. You hopefully want shares to be up 20, 30%. By now, you know, just to get that momentum and for the markets to really understand the story, but that has not happened, right? So share price didn't pop. It's stagnated. You know, you know, I mean, it listed at 7.8 billion euro market cap, which is way below analyst expectations and hasn't really moved since then. So what happens when a company IPO's and doesn't really move and analysts don't really get it, the private equity guys start to start to circle. And the headline was that, you know, within five months of this company going public, the likes of the KKRs and the CDNRs are making inquiries and going, Hey, this would be a brilliant, you know, private equity own company. We know how to do consumer. We know how to do the logistics of a cold storage frozen, you know, business supply chain. Um, you know, let us take it off your hands. So what are the only Unilever side then? What options do they have? So the private equity guys are sort of emailing knocking at your door. Like, what other options could you entertain? Other than just going to be or is that the cleanest way? Yeah, absolutely. So this is, this is a, this is a really complex one. And again, it gets into the world of, of tax and, and capital gains and all of this kind of stuff. So when a company like Unilever wants to sell a division, but doesn't necessarily need to raise new money for that division, the last thing it wants to do is incur a tax hit, either for Unilever because they've sold something that they quote unquote bought for a lot less, and that's a capital gains tax. And for the shareholders, they don't want to be seen to be getting any uptick in value because that's seen as a taxable event as well. So it, you know, you want to have what you would call a tax free demurger. And so what happened is Unilever with its bankers said, all right, we're going to IPO. Every Unilever shareholder will get for every four shares of Unilever, they will get a share of Magnum, right? And Unilever is going to keep 20% of Magnum as well. We are not going to raise any new money. We are going to keep the valuation of Magnum as if it were still part of the overall value of Unilever. So there's no tax event for the shareholders. And as a shareholder, I end up on IPO day having four shares of Unilever and one share of Magnum, I don't have a tax. tax it, Unilever doesn't have a tax it because they haven't incurred a capital gain because haven't made any money through the proceeds of the IPO because nothing was raised. So this was the way that it was deemed to be cleanest and most efficient. Now, according to M&A, according to the inline revenue code, I'm going to call it section 355 of the internal revenue code in the US. There you go. Basically says, look, if you do anything within two years, that changes the status of the demurger, I change of control. At the moment, to the tax people, Magnum is still controlled by the original Unilever shareholders plus that 20% Unilever stake. Yes, Unilever shareholders can sell, but that's, you know, and when they sell their linker, a capital gains hit as well. But if they were to sell the whole company, that triggers capital gains tax that invalidates the merger agree, the demurger. So yes, KKR and CDNR are sniffing around, but in my mind, this is a two year lockup, right? You know, it would be mad for Magnum to entertain selling the business. You know, the share price isn't doing great, but it's not absolutely bombing. So if KKR and CDNR were to come along, they would have to probably compensate, find some kind of tax compensation mechanism to make up for the invalidation of the demurger arrangement. This is getting a bit complex. That's going to say, but I'm sure it's not the first time that PE firms have found a way around if they think they can unlock the necessary fruits of that process, I guess. But yeah, so a little bit more perhaps substantial on the headline that it is in reality, as you said, sounds like a bit of a lockup for two years. So let's move to show along, and let's talk about the next one, which is Echo Lab starts a five-part bond sale to fund acquisition of cool IT. So first two questions that come to mine or first few, who are these companies? Then why do five parts of the bonds sale? I guess let's start there. Yeah, absolutely. So Echo Lab, Echo Lab, call it what you want. I would have gone to Echo Lab, but we'll see. I think it probably can be either. But Echo Lab is a Minnesota based company that supplies water and hygiene services to for industrial and energy businesses. It's a big business. It acquired in March or agreed to acquire cool IT systems. There's a reason why this is kind of interesting. It does liquid cooling for next generation AI data centers. Are we getting the thing? I like the fact that I've got a nice little magnum sandwich though. We had ice cream in the middle just to bring us back down to earth, but we're back into the heavy AI infrastructure buildout. So March agreed to acquire this company, cool IT systems, $550 million of sales, forward sales. So purchased on a kind of 8.5 times forward revenue basis, which again is a little bit more sexy than the Dominion transaction that we spoke about earlier. But the reason why I wanted to speak about bonds, A, because the headline came out this week, four billion investment grade bonds. It's really interesting to understand the mechanisms of a transaction after the transaction is announced, right? And we spoke about this few weeks go with Eli Lilly. You've got the March 26 announcement, which is the one that the M&A bankers, the advisors are working extremely hard on. And then as soon as the transactions announced, it's not like that's done, right? You've got a heck of a lot of work to do to go from transaction announcement to completion and signing on the dotted line. And part of that is securing the financing. So the way that it will work, and I'm just going to give you some names here. So City Bank was the exclusive financial advisor to ECO Lab. As you said earlier, cities had a pretty rough year from an M&A perspective. I think it's the only one that's down over the big players relative to the Goldman Sacksers and Jacob Morgan's of this world. But City was the exclusive financial advisor. And guess what? Cities on the bond sale as well. As you would imagine. So the way that this would work is for this transaction. If I am cool IT systems, which is owned by KKR, if I'm KKR and cool IT systems, I see this offer. I want to know that funds are in place, right? So fun, you know, so that is the role of City and Wells Fargo and Barclays Bank of America to say we are going to get the bond issue out there to finance this transaction. They don't actually have to have raised the money in order to say that they are going to raise the money. So the deal was announced in March with the firm commitment that these bonds would be raised to finance the transaction. And then obviously be fast forward two and a half months. And now the bond issue is going out. Four-part transaction bonds of three to ten years. Interestingly, it's longest tenor bond, and again, anyone that listened to the Eli Lilly podcast couple of weeks ago. So its longest tenor ten-year bond is 0.73% or 73 basis points above treasuries against initial talk of 95 basis points. This is for a, you know, a three, a minus rated credit rated company. These spreads are so, so tight, right? Yeah, it's absolutely remarkable for a company of this nature. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff with it kind of hiding within this deal about the kind of mechanics of deal making. So in reality, then, just for a lot of the people listening who are thinking about potential careers. So this would be a case where the M&A advisor team and the debt capital markets to DCM team, they would presumably they're working very closely and fairly early on in transaction because they're going to need to provide some evidence of the quality and the deliverable of getting that debt financing in place. Would that be right? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you're, let's wind it back to maybe, you know, January 2025, and the city guys go for an exploratory meeting with the financial, the CFO of ECO Lab. And the city guys, there'll be a sector coverage person covering ECO Lab and the infrastructure utilities, water services, team, whatever it might be called. And then you'll have a couple of M&A guys that will have done their kind of valuation work and they would have done their comp, you know, comparables work and they'll be looking at the sector trends and all of this stuff. And they'll be identifying cool ideas and interesting target, right? That might be on coming up on the market since it's private equity owned. And then there'll be the financing guys, the DCM guys, the debt financing guys, the guys that will just issue, you know, bank debt for this transaction, the ECM guys, the equity capital markets guys, and they'll all be sticking their slides into this mega deck to come up with this, you know, 60, 70 slide piece of work that says, all right, we can do it all, you know, not only have we got the strategic shops to figure out how to buy this company cool IT systems, but we're also going to provide all the financing and it's a one stop shop, you know, put a little bit of a bow on it and off we go. To conclude this one then, so how have KKR come out of this one? I just absolutely bonkers this. So how do KKR do I do? It acquired cool IT in 2023? For $270 million. So this is and they sort of for $5 billion. That is insane about that. You know, if you put a little bit of debt, you know, they might have written $150 million, a million dollar equity check, put in some debt, and then they're there, I mean, this is an absolute blockbuster. Interesting enough, you know, it was right place, right time. Right. The data center built out narrative and wasn't a thing in 2023. It most certainly is now. So credit to them for that 150 million check before it was really booming, I guess. Yeah, I'll raise a I'll raise a cornetto to them. All right, we've got to just went through two more then, and this one is British takeovers up 250%. I've I've I read that right. Am I looking at the right thing here? Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, the headline British takeovers up 250% as global buyers bypass political flux. So again, it's this weird parallel universe of headlines. If you read any newspaper or any news website, then saying it's all doom and gloom and Britain is in the doll drums and oh my gosh, political instability dot dot dot. And then behind the scenes, I wouldn't say that this is a good news story for UK PLC, but things are still going on, right. People are still willing to invest in in in the UK. And so there's already been a hunt I thought Jamie Diamond was sending some threatening signals to what's going on with the political leadership in regards to this whopper of a building that he was planning on building by the river. I was really excited that they owned. But is he not threatening that a little bit? Is that a, I guess, for those who aren't used to this? Is that a normal thing for someone in the financial world to be waiting into the political scene in a foreign territory from where that bank is from? Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think Jamie Diamond's a bit kind of singular in his ability and, or his purported ability to wade in on political matters and sometimes he wades in where he probably isn't wanted. But, you know, it probably goes to show just how far the stock of the UK has fallen that we feel like we might have to cow-towl to someone that wants to build a big building in Canary Wharf as a reason for changing the whole political framework or the whole political ideology of a potentially new government. So, you know, lobbying and such like is a tale as old as time and Jamie Diamond does it more vocally than most. Yeah, I mean, we, it's this, it's this really, really fine line that again, the UK government, whether it's going to be the same now as it is in a few months time, only time will tell. But it's a super fine line. You want to push through your ideological agenda and, but you also want to make sure that you're not disrupting, upsetting the bond markets, which obviously is, you know, we talk about the bond markets a lot in the context of politics, but also the, the kind of foreign direct investment that comes into places like London in the form of big buildings and tens of thousands of employees. So, you know, it's worth bearing in mind, right? And you want to have a business-friendly agenda. So, to that point, $150 billion of mergers and acquisitions in the UK this year, up 250% from last year. Again, compare this China, I think was, sorry, Japan was up 90% last year. It's down 10% this year. So, it's kind of, you know, the money has moved to the UK. And this is not necessarily a good thing, by the way. So this, this reminds me in a way of our national lament about selling a bunch of like prime property and prime assets in London to foreign investors, right? You know, we lament about the fact that we don't own harrads anymore and we don't own the Savoy and we don't own clarages and we don't know one high park and all of these kind of landmark buildings because we've just sold them to the highest bidder. It feels a little bit like that, right? Because some of the companies that are on the market, so InterTech, bit of a stalwart of the FTSE 100, product testing company, ingredients make a date and lile. One of the oldest FTSE constituents, say, yeah, it's a subject to take over pursuits that's not been announced yet. But like, this is like selling off the family China, right? Or the family silver. It's exciting that there's lots of deals being done. But basically what's happening is there are richer people out there or richer countries and richer companies that spot a slightly beleaguered country and slightly depressed share prices and go, I'll have a piece of that. So would your end summary analysis be then that this is a short term stimulus to the M&A activity because there's no actual underlying tailwinds to support UK innovation and new companies coming and deals thriving? This is more, as you said, because of our modern history, let's say, over the last past few hundred years, we have some real prize ground jewels, if you like, that could be sold off. Well, that's not infinite as a resource, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think you're absolutely right. This is not we have got an amazing AI sector and there's big, big money transactions going on. It's a case of what we call it the business multiple arbitrage. So if I am a US company, the S&P 500, it's price earnings multiples, average is 22.4. The FTSE 100 is trading at an average price earnings multiple of 13 times. So if I am an average member of the S&P 500 and my stock is trading 22.4 times earnings and I buy a company in the UK for, let's say, 15 times earnings, I take those earnings and I push them through my US company ecosystem and suddenly they turn from 13 times in terms of valuation to 22 times, right? You know, it is a method as old as time to benefit from this kind of arbitrage. You know, this could go on until every member of UK PLC is kind of, is gutted, right? Obviously that's when the government has to step in and we have to start putting up slightly more barriers to taking the family silver. All right. Last one, just for a few minutes, TikTok. I didn't think we'd be talking about TikTok creator wanting to buy a major, significant US airline. So how does that work? Yeah, so this is, this is a couple of weeks old, but I really wanted to bring this up because I think it's an absolutely brilliant story. I don't know where it's going to go, but spare airlines, the famous low-cost budget US airline group that we actually covered on the podcast a couple of years ago, there was an aborted, there was a $3.8 billion merger on the table with jet blue that got kiboshed by regulators, by the federal judge, everyone's blaming Joe Biden. And since then, spirit, spirit is just not a go-and-concern, right? It just doesn't have the business model to survive, right? In November 2024, it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, got restructured, debt to equity swap, and then again, in August 2025, it filed for bankruptcy, got restructured again, and then this final kind of last breath of bailout where the US, where the government was thinking about a bailout package because spirits somewhat structurally significant to the US air, you know, aerospace economy or airline economy, that fell through at the end of April beginning of May. And then on the second of May, the lights went out, right? Plains were grounded, flights were cancelled. We have all of these images of, you know, flight screens with cancel, cancel, cancel, canceled all the way down. And a lot of people were left, you know, not being able to fly or not being able to take up that, take up that flight that they were going to make, which for millions of passengers in the US is massively gutting because spirits cheap, it's cheerful, it gets you from A to B, right? And a lot of the alternative carriers are not so cheap and not so cheerful. So what happens is this guy, Hunter Peterson, who obviously I've never heard of before researching this story, Hunter Peterson, a voice actor, digital creator and aviation content personality, which has got to be an aspiration. He wants, by the way, you know, this is, you know, anything goes on ticked up. He wants, uh, flew 24 hours consecutively on spear airlines flights, so dotting around, taking short flights, but for accumulative 24 hours, obviously posting the content. Anyway, he loves spirit and obviously was gutted to see the bankruptcy, the failure of the company, the 14,000 jobs going, etc. So he started this ticked up personality, Hunter Peterson, the Let's Buy Spirit campaign, right? And he basically said, look, there's more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the US. If we only took 20, 20% of them and paid the average fare for a spirit airlines flight, 30 to 40 bucks, we could buy spirit airlines, which, you know, in terms of back, back of a bag packet calculation, it's about as good as they come, right? Let's just get 20% of the population to pay 40 bucks and then we can buy an airline. Weird, right? But the way these things go, it went viral and all of a sudden, and I'm just looking on the website at the moment, there is $337 million from ordinary punters pledged to buy spirit airlines. What are you going to hang about? What does pledged be? Hmm, well, yes, good question. That's probably the first stage of due diligence would ask that question. Pledge basically means look, you know, if this thing actually happens, if you actually table a bid, you know, I've pledged $800 towards a thing, but it's non-binding. I don't actually have to put in the money, right? So. I could pledge $10,000 tomorrow if I wanted and then just pull out the last minute. So, they've got a website, they've got 371,000 pledges, average pledge size of $907. It's quite bonkers how this is really hit a nerve or hit a chord with punters, with tick tockers, with people that fly on spirit. They're like, look, we want a community own, this loss making financially extremely unstable but well loved for being cheap airline. I think you're actually giving too much credit to the business case here. I think this is a very clever content creator who knows exactly as you described, because of the nature of the demographic who would use such a service. He knows it can hit a nerve and it has the reality to go really big. It's the optimal conditions to create content in and around as a subject. So, I think, what we're talking about it and we're based in Mary Old London and there he is traveling around America doing his thing. So, I think it's a genius marketing strike and that's where it begins and ends, personally. I think you're absolutely right and fair play to the guy, Hunter Peterson. As you said, we're speaking about him. His followers would have gone up quite significantly. So, yeah, whether this thing dies at F, by the way, community acquired entities is possible. So, the Green Bay Packers, NFL franchise, they're the only community owned franchise in the NFL, 360 ordinary people own shares, 360,000 ordinary people own shares. And it happens in the UK, our local pub is a community owned pub. We raised about 150,000 pounds. It's not quite on the same level. So, it does happen, but will it happen with an extraordinarily complex, lost making airline that's gone bankrupt three times in the last 18 months? Probably not. All right, yeah, I'd love to see that curve on his analytics of what his follow account looks like over the last few weeks. But great stuff. Well, as ever, if anyone has any thoughts, views, opinions, agreements, grudges, let us know in the comments. We'd love to engage with everyone in the community. Otherwise, if you're in the UK listening to this, hope you've had a wonderful bank holiday weekend. Enjoy the sun. Enjoy your magnum or cornetto. Let us know where your leanings are on going posh or going basic. Steven has spoken. Otherwise, thank you, Steven, as always, and we'll catch you everyone next week. Thanks very much.