The Deals of the Year, 2021 Edition
Summary
Do-over deal: Less than a week after Didi’s blockbuster initial public offering in New York in June, China cracked down on the Beijing-based company, halting new user sign-ups and ordering it off app stores. • None Honorable mention: Two years after a spectacularly failed I.P.O., as the pandemic threatened its core co-working business, WeWork went public in October via a SPAC deal, managing to raise more than $1 billion in the process. • None Honorable mentions: The first Bitcoin exchange-traded funds were approved, exposing a wider group of investors to the assets; the artist known as Beeple sold a jpeg for $69 million, helping establish nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, as a cottage industry; and the Staples Center in Los Angeles will soon become the Crypto.com Arena. Also, he regularly demonstrated his ability to move the price of Bitcoin with his tweets — and managed to give Dogecoin a shout out on “Saturday Night Live.” SPAC innovation attempt of the year: Bill Ackman’s $4 billion special purpose acquisition company is the largest ever raised, and when it identified a deal target this year, it broke more new ground: A complex proposal to buy 10 percent of Universal Music, which unexpectedly spawned a new species of blank-check firm as part of the transaction. The billionaire’s hedge fund bought the Universal stake instead, but he pressed ahead with his plan for a new type of vehicle, which he called a SPARC, that he said improves on the traditional SPAC structure.