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When Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith founded Vice magazine, which later expanded to Vice Media, they built a business based on a punk rock, counterculture image. Smith once had himself recorded, nearly naked and drinking alcohol, giving a tour of the media organization’s Brooklyn, New York, headquarters.

The company’s name is Vice. It’s self-explanatory.

Next week, Vice, once valued at $5.7 billion, is planning to sell itself out of bankruptcy. A little-known Los Angeles-based company that wants to buy it has a quixotic culture that would be incomparable to those early days of Vice, and it would almost certainly be derided.

GoDigital Media Group is a privately held conglomerate that owns video and music rights, especially in the Latin genre, and an array of different businesses. The company has such a low profile, it currently doesn’t have a physical headquarters after shutting down its Los Angeles office during the pandemic. GoDigital plans to open up a new LA office later this year. Its executives have been running the business remotely since 2020.

Initially, co-founders Jason Peterson, 41, and Logan Mulvey, 38, used cash flow from music-licensing rights to establish a business around digital media distribution, connecting content creators to retailers by developing a cloud software company called ContentBridge in 2010. GoDigital later expanded its rights business to include those from Jason DeRulo and T.I. Last year, GoDigital invested $100 million into that division for future growth. Music rights ownership makes up the bulk of the company’s revenue and valuation.

In recent years, Peterson, GoDigital’s chief executive officer and chair, has modeled the company as a mini-Berkshire Hathaway as he attempts to play what’s called “the infinite game” — owning durable businesses that hit passion points for consumers.

GoDigital has made eight different acquisitions since 2020 that have spanned media and commerce. Peterson and Mulvey have pursued distressed assets with consumer brand recognition. They acquired YogaWorks for $9.6 million in 2021 after it filed for bankruptcy in October 2020. And last year, the pair plucked assets out of bankruptcy, scooping up retailers Eastern Mountain Sports and Bob’s Stores for $70 million.

The total portfolio now includes seven companies after it merged two of its companies, Latino-focused media companies Mitu and NGL Collective, co-founded by actor John Leguizamo. GoDigital employs about 1,300 people through its subsidiaries and generates annual revenue in the high hundreds of millions.

The company wants to “inspire happiness” along the way, said Peterson in an interview that evoked the opposite of the in-your-face culture that Smith brought to Vice.

“Our goal is to create emotions of joy and happiness in our customers and our employees,” said Peterson. “What differentiates us is our long-term perspective. The goal of the infinite game is simply continuity of play to make sure the game goes on. And when you live and work in that kind of a paradigm, you’re living and working in a compound interest paradigm.”

GoDigital co-founders Logan Mulvey (L) and Jason Peterson (C) with chief strategy officer Craig Greiwe (R)

Source: GoDigital

Vice’s bankruptcy sale

Vice would be GoDigital’s largest acquisition to date. GoDigital plans to bid for Vice on Tuesday at a price between $300 million and $400 million, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. GoDigital’s executives wouldn’t comment on the specifics of their planned bid.

If another buyer makes a bid or offers to purchase part of the company but not the whole, an auction would be held on June 22. The next day a judge would confirm a potential acquisition during a court hearing.

Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt is also considering a bid, said a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Revolt couldn’t be reached for comment.

Fortress Investment, Vice’s largest creditor turned equity holder, is running the sale process and has pledged to back a portion of GoDigital’s bid and other potential offers, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details of the bids are private. Fortress, along with Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, has committed to a stalking horse bid of $225 million.

A spokesperson for Fortress declined to comment.

GoDigital’s opaque finances and hodgepodge of smaller assets is stirring skepticism about its ability to acquire a company of Vice’s size. Chief Strategy Officer Craig Greiwe, who was tasked with finding acquisition targets when he joined the company last year, said GoDigital is holding talks with other equity partners on a bid. He declined to provide any names.

“I can understand the skepticism if people haven’t heard of us,” said Greiwe.  “We do have the money to buy it.  We are serious in our bid.  We are also confident that the sellers view us as a legitimate and credible bidder.  We are confident that we can run the company and do so profitably.”

‘The Zone of Genius’

Peterson and Mulvey said they want to own Vice because think it’s been run poorly. They cite the company’s profligate spending, specifically wondering why it’s leasing 20 offices and production hubs throughout the world rather than having employees work remotely. The co-founders are in talks with Alex Wallace, the former head of media and content at Yahoo from 2020 to 2022, to be Vice’s new CEO if GoDigital buys the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Wallace declined to comment.

As CEO, Peterson said he tries to match his portfolio companies’ employees with their own interests. “The Zone of Genius,” a concept borrowed from Gay Hendricks’ “The Big Leap,” is about the intersection between what a person loves and what they are good at doing, Peterson explained. He will preach that message to Vice’s employees on Day One if GoDigital acquires the company, he said.

“I’m going to go in there and I’m going to treat everybody as an individual human, and we’re going to try and figure out what are their individual purposes, what are their values?” Peterson said. “Because when we work at the confluence of what we like and what we’re great at or good at, we’re going to do well. It doesn’t matter how good we are at something if we don’t like it. We’re not going to do it for a long time. When you have high degrees of alignment of purpose between the individual and the organization, that’s when the magic happens.”

When business conversations turn to concepts like happiness and value alignment, it’s easy to think about WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s mission to elevate the world’s consciousness and cringe. It’s particularly jarring to match up the airy language against Vice’s original mission. Smith, Vice’s executive chairman and former CEO, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Shane Smith, co-founder of Vice.

CNBC

GoDigital’s executives show no embarrassment about their New Age-style business school lingo. They believe linking passion and purpose creates “an incredible positive feedback loop for the company,” said Peterson.

“Recognizing that people make decisions based on their emotional state, our goal is to inspire happiness through an ecosystem of content, community and commerce across consumer passion points,” said Greiwe. “I’m now the person who dreams that at night. There’s a fundamental belief in making the impossible possible and doing it before anyone else.”

Similarities to the portfolio

Any company, including GoDigital, would have its share of problems in taking on Vice.

Vice had revenue of about $600 million last year and wasn’t profitable, Axios reported last month. Vice has been cash flow negative for “several years” according to a bankruptcy filing.

“There’s no reason that Vice shouldn’t be profitable today, but for its past mismanagement,” Peterson said.

But simply figuring out what Vice employees want to do and making sure they do it doesn’t solve problems like a weak advertising market or competition for content. Still, Peterson and Mulvey see similarities between Vice’s business and several companies they already own. Mulvey pointed to YogaWorks as a business GoDigital has transitioned to meet new ways of consumption.

With YogaWorks, GoDigital has attempted to disrupt an in-studio yoga consumer base with an online subscription service offering digitally distributed at-home classes. YogaWorks shut down all of its brick-and-mortar locations as part of its bankruptcy reorganization and has “only lost a very small number of customers” as GoDigital has transitioned the business online, Mulvey said.

Mulvey, who took over as YogaWorks’ CEO in January, said the shift from studio-based to in-home yoga is analogous to changing media-consumption habits.

“People consumed Vice on HBO or cable TV,” Mulvey said, alluding to Vice’s now-cancelled show on HBO and Vice’s cable network. “We’ve got to make sure we understand the followers and the customers that the way we’re evolving the business makes sense for how people consume news, media, fun or exercise on the go.”

Peterson noted Vice’s business model is similar to NGL-Mitu. Both make money off branded content and social amplification.

“This is not a new type of business for us,” Peterson said. “It’s a multi-platform network. We know how to run one.”

Greiwe added “the fundamentals of Vice are strong” and said GoDigital had no plans to sell of any of Vice’s assets, including the women-focused Refinery29, which Vice acquired for $400 million in 2019, and its homegrown advertising agency, Virtue.

“The brand value for Vice and Refinery29 is unparalleled in the marketplace,” said Greiwe. “It doesn’t make sense for Vice News to exist separate from Vice Publishing. And why would you not have Vice Studios on top of all of that with the decades of IP that exists within that company?”

Peterson acknowledged that much of his interest in buying Vice is he thinks it’s a good candidate for implementing his preferred culture and management style, which he calls “the GoDigital way.”

If he’s right, all Vice ever needed to succeed was a bankruptcy process to service its $834 million of outstanding debt and a little more zoned genius.

— CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo contributed to this report.

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USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

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USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle 

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.

While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.

JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.

This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.

Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation.

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation. It makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.” 

The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is navigating renewed political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector is ramping up as the industry grows increasingly confident that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins.

Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they integrate more of them into crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin.

The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.

More recently, however, rhetoric around stablecoins’ ability to help preserve U.S. dollar dominance – by exporting dollar utility internationally and ensuring demand for U.S. government debt, which backs nearly all dollar-denominated stablecoins – has grown louder.

A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent crypto-native firms to list on a U.S. exchange — an important signal for both investors and regulators as digital assets become more entwined with the traditional financial system.

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Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

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Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.

Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.

Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.

“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.

A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company. 

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.

But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.

That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable. 

During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.

But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.

With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.

WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

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Meta’s head of AI research announces departure

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Meta's head of AI research announces departure

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company. 

Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30. 

Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.

“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”

Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.

Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images

Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps. 

She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.

Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.

Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February

“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.” 

Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”

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