Chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company Bob Iger and Mickey Mouse look on before ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), November 27, 2017 in New York City.
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Usually when a person or company sells something, the primary motivation is getting back as much money as possible.
Disney‘s motivation to potentially sell ABC and its owned affiliates, linear cable networks and a minority stake in ESPN isn’t predicated on what these assets will fetch in a sale. It’s about signaling to investors the time has come to stop thinking about Disney as old media.
Disney’s market capitalization is about $156 billion. The company has about $45 billion in debt. Selling assets can help the entertainment giant lower its leverage ratio while buffering the continued losses from its streaming businesses.
Still, that’s not the prime rationale for why Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger told CNBC in July he’s contemplating selling off media assets — something he’s long resisted. Rather, a sale of ABC and linear cable networks would be a message to the investment community: The era of traditional TV is over. Disney is ready for its next chapter.
“Disney almost has a good bank and a bad bank at this point,” Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall said in a CNBC interview. “Streaming is its future. It’s its strongest asset, next to the parks. The linear business is something Disney has clearly signaled is going to be in decline. They’re not looking to necessarily protect it. If they can move some of that lower, negative-growth business off of the books and to a better, more logical operator, we think that’s good for the stock.”
Nexstar has held preliminary conversations with Disney to acquire ABC and its owned and operated affiliates, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Media mogul Byron Allen has made a preliminary offer to pay $10 billion for ABC and its affiliates along with cable networks FX and National Geographic, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Disney released a statement Thursday saying “while we are open to considering a variety of strategic options for our linear businesses, at this time The Walt Disney Company has made no decision with respect to the divestiture of ABC or any other property and any report to that effect is unfounded.”
Declining values
The value of broadcast and cable networks has significantly declined from the 1990s and early 2000s as tens of millions of Americans have canceled cable in recent years.
Cahall values ABC and Disney’s eight owned affiliate networks at about $4.5 billion. That’s a far cry from the $19 billion Disney paid for Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 — the deal that brought Iger to the company.
ESPN has a valuation of about $30 billion, according KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel, “though we view it as a melting iceberg,” he added in a September note to clients. LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield values ESPN at closer to $20 billion.
Disney would like to keep a majority stake in ESPN, Iger told CNBC. It currently owns 80% of the sports media business, and Hearst owns the other 20%.
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Selling ABC
Disney’s most interesting decision may be deciding what to do with the ABC network. The company can easily sell off its eight owned and operated affiliate stations — located in markets including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles — without changing the trajectory of the media industry.
But divesting the ABC network would be a bold statement by Disney that it sees no future in the broadcast cable world of content distribution.
Selling ABC would be particularly jarring given Iger’s comments both to CNBC and in Disney’s last earnings conference call that he wants the company to stay in the sports business.
“The sports business stands tall and remains a good value proposition,” Iger said last month during Disney’s third-quarter earnings conference call. “We believe in the power of sports and the unique ability to convene and engage audiences.”
There’s clear value, at least for the next few years, in keeping a large broadcast network for major sports leagues. NBCUniversal executives hope ownership of the NBC network will convince the NBA that it should be cut into a new rights agreement to carry NBA games. NBC is a free over-the-air service and can increase the league’s reach, they plan to argue. Even if the world is transitioning to streaming, millions of Americans still use digital antennas to watch TV.
Currently, ESPN and ABC split sports rights. Selling ABC may trigger certain change-of-control provisions that force existing deals with pay TV operators or the leagues to be rewritten, according to people familiar with typical language around such deals.
Moving on from the network also may obstruct ESPN’s ability to land future sports rights deals. Without ownership of ABC, leagues may choose to sell rights to other companies, thus further weakening ESPN.
If Iger is true to his word and Disney stays in the sports broadcasting business, the company will have to weigh the negative externalities of losing ABC with the positive gains of showing investors it’s serious about shedding declining assets.
“Obviously, there’s complexity as it relates to decoupling the linear nets from ESPN, but nothing that we feel we can’t contend with if we were to ultimately create strategic realignment,” Iger said last month.
The way forward
If Disney does land a deal to sell ABC, and investors cheer the move, it may also function as a catalyst for other large legacy media companies to sell their declining assets. NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery all have legacy broadcast and cable networks in addition to their flagship streaming services.
Disney may become the leader in pushing the industry forward.
“We see this as a real bullish sign at Disney.” said Cahall. “There’s a lot going on now at Disney, between ESPN and partnerships and divesting some of this stuff. Disney is suddenly feeling a little more catalyst-rich than it was recently.”
– CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo contributed to this article.
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
WATCH: Nexstar could ‘no doubt’ take ABC and monetize it really well, says Wells Fargo analyst
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, the company’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, have been commercially deployed at CoreWeave, the companies announced on Thursday.
CoreWeave has received shipments of Dell-built shipments based around Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 AI systems, Dell said on Thursday. It’s the first cloud provider to install systems based around Blackwell Ultra.
The Blackwell Ultra is Nvidia’s latest chip, expected to ship in volume during the rest of the year. The systems that CoreWeave is installing are liquid-cooled and include 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs. The systems are assembled and tested in the U.S., Dell said.
CoreWeave shares rose 6% during trading on Thursday, Dell shares were up about 2% and Nvidia rose less than 2%.
The announcement is a milestone for Nvidia.
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AI developers still clamor for the latest Nvidia chips, which have improvements that make them better for training and deploying models.
Nvidia said Blackwell Ultra can produce 50 times more AI content than its predecessor, Blackwell.
Investors closely watch how Nvidia manages the transition when it announces new AI chips to see if there are production issues or delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in May that Blackwell Ultra shipments would start in the current quarter.
It’s also a win for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs to other clouds and AI developers. Although CoreWeave is smaller than the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, its ability to offer Nvidia’s latest chips first give it a way to differentiate itself.
CoreWeave historically has a close relationship with Nvidia, which owns a stake in the cloud provider. CoreWeave went public earlier this year, and the stock price has quadrupled since its IPO.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
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For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
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Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.
The position was valued at about $160 million as of Wednesday’s close.
Tripadvisor shares have been flat since the start of the year after plummeting more than 30% in 2024. Last year, the travel review and booking company said it created a special committee to explore potential options.
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Starboard Value has gained a reputation for pushing for changes such as new CEOs and cost cuts by acquiring significant shares in companies.