TL;DR
It was a landmark week for M&A and markets. Sun Pharma's $11.75 billion takeover of Organon is biopharma's biggest deal of 2026 — and a rare cross-border carve-out of a Merck spinoff. Big Tech reported blowout earnings driven by AI and cloud: Alphabet's profit surged 81%, Microsoft beat on revenue, and Meta's net income hit $26.8 billion — all while announcing a combined $300B+ in AI capex. That capex signal is the week's most important IB takeaway: it's driving a wave of infrastructure M&A in data centers, power, and fiber that will keep deal flow elevated into year-end.
TOP 3 DEALS
DEAL 1 Pharma / Cross-Border
VALUE: $11.75B EV · $14.00/share all-cash
STRUCTURE: All-cash; announced Apr 26; expected close early 2027
BUYER ADVISORS (SUN PHARMA): J.P. Morgan, Jefferies (financial); White & Case (legal); Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG (financing)
SELLER ADVISORS (ORGANON): Morgan Stanley (lead), Goldman Sachs (financial); Sullivan & Cromwell (legal)
India's Sun Pharma — the world's fourth-largest specialty generic drugmaker — is acquiring Organon, a women's health and biosimilars company spun out of Merck in 2021. The combined entity will have ~$12.4 billion in annual revenue and a global footprint across 140+ countries, giving Sun Pharma its long-sought entry into the U.S. branded pharmaceutical market.CNBC ↗ Fierce Pharma ↗ Sullivan & Cromwell ↗
Why it matters for recruiting: This is a cross-border take-private of a U.S.-listed spinoff — two concepts that come up constantly in M&A interviews. Organon was spun from Merck just 5 years ago; Sun Pharma is now acquiring it at a premium. The deal illustrates how spinoffs can trade at a discount to intrinsic value and become M&A targets, and how an all-cash structure signals buyer conviction when the acquirer has a strong balance sheet.
DEAL 2 Industrials / PE Carve-Out
VALUE: €1.82B (~$2.1B) EV; expected close H2 2026
STRUCTURE: PE carve-out; Apollo Funds acquires standalone business unit
BUYER ADVISORS (APOLLO): UBS, UniCredit (financial); Kirkland & Ellis, Paul Weiss (legal)
SELLER ADVISORS (FORVIA): Evercore (lead), Crédit Agricole CIB (financial); Baker McKenzie (legal)
Apollo is carving out Forvia SE's Interiors Business Group — one of the world's largest makers of instrument panels, door panels, and center consoles — to create a standalone auto interiors supplier. Forvia is shedding the unit to focus on higher-margin electronics and clean mobility as EV adoption reshapes auto supplier economics. Bloomberg ↗ Forvia ↗
Why it matters for recruiting: Carve-outs are one of the most complex deal structures in IB — you're selling a business that shares systems, people, and contracts with the parent, which creates standalone costs and TSA (transition services agreement) negotiations. Apollo's thesis here is classic PE: buy a non-core, cash-generative industrial at a reasonable multiple, operate it independently, and exit in 3–5 years.
DEAL 3 Biotech / Oncology
VALUE: Up to $7B ($3.25B upfront + milestones); expected close H2 2026
STRUCTURE: Contingent value rights (CVRs); milestone-based payments
BUYER ADVISORS (LILLY): Kirkland & Ellis (legal)
SELLER ADVISORS (KELONIA): Jefferies (financial); Goodwin Procter (legal)
Eli Lilly is acquiring Boston-based Kelonia Therapeutics, which is developing in vivo CAR-T cell therapy — technology that reprograms a patient's own T-cells inside the body to attack cancer, eliminating the need for the costly ex vivo manufacturing process that makes current CAR-T treatments inaccessible to most patients. Bloomberg ↗ Kirkland & Ellis ↗
Why it matters for recruiting: Milestone-based deal structures (CVRs) are common in biotech M&A when buyer and seller disagree on probability of clinical success. Know the mechanic: $3.25B upfront de-risks the acquisition; remaining payments trigger only if clinical, regulatory, and commercial milestones are hit. In an interview, you'd explain this as a way to bridge valuation gaps when future cash flows are binary and uncertain.
SECTOR SIGNAL
DEFENSE / AEROSPACE
Carve-outs are dominating A&D deal flow as prime contractors and tier-1 suppliers reshape portfolios around next-gen priorities. Karman Space & Defense completed acquisitions of Seemann Composites and MSC to establish a new Maritime Defense Systems end market. Mid-market A&D M&A remains highly active as buyers target mission-critical capabilities. Solomon Partners ↗
TECH / TMT
Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha in a transatlantic AI consolidation play, combining Cohere's global scale with Aleph Alpha's sovereign AI research. Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile mega-merger talks (~$260B) continue in the background. AI infrastructure is the dominant M&A theme in TMT heading into Q2. Motley Fool ↗
INDUSTRIALS
Apollo/Forvia carve-out (see Top 3) is the week's defining industrials story — a clean example of a European auto supplier shedding a non-core unit to a U.S. PE firm. EV transition is accelerating portfolio reshaping across the entire auto supply chain. Bloomberg ↗
ENERGY
Oil surged above $100/barrel this week on fresh Trump threats against Iran over the Strait of Hormuz — the first time crude has crossed that threshold this year. Energy price spike adds a new layer of inflation complexity for the Fed and raises input costs across industrials. Yahoo Finance ↗
LEVERAGED FINANCE
High-yield spreads hover near historic tights (~T+267 bps), but private credit is increasingly competing with broadly syndicated loans for large LBO financings — compressing economics for traditional bank syndicates. Default projections are improving (US defaults forecast to drop to 3.0% by Oct 2026 from 5.3% a year ago), but selective investor caution persists on large, highly-levered deals — as the Sealed Air concession saga from last week made clear. PitchBook ↗ Moody's ↗
MARKET TONE
Big Tech earnings: blowout week. Alphabet (+81% profit), Microsoft (rev $82.9B, +18% YoY), Meta ($26.8B net income), Amazon (cloud beat) — all four reported Wednesday after the bell and beat estimates. AI and cloud are delivering; markets rallied Thursday on the results. Bloomberg ↗
AI capex is the signal that matters for IB. Microsoft guided $190B in capex for the year; Meta raised guidance to $125–145B. This level of infrastructure spend is directly driving M&A in data centers, power infrastructure, fiber, and cooling — every banker covering tech or industrials needs to understand this cycle. Motley Fool ↗
Fed held at 3.75% — Powell's last meeting. As expected, no rate change. Jerome Powell confirmed he'll stay on as governor after his chairmanship ends May 15; Kevin Warsh is widely expected to take the chair, introducing communication uncertainty as the Fed navigates oil-driven inflation. Yahoo Finance ↗
Oil above $100 for first time in 2026. U.S. crude futures crossed $100/barrel on Trump's fresh threats toward Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Energy prices at this level risk re-accelerating inflation and giving the incoming Fed chair cover to delay any cuts further into 2027. Yahoo Finance ↗
Pernod Ricard / Brown-Forman talks collapse. The two spirits giants confirmed April 28 that merger discussions — first reported in March — have ended without a deal. A reminder that high-profile M&A rumors don't always close, and valuation disagreements or cultural fit issues can kill deals at any stage. Dealroom ↗
INTERVIEW ANGLE
TOPIC: THE BIG TECH AI CAPEX CYCLE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR M&A
If an interviewer asks "what's the biggest theme driving deal flow right now?", the right answer isn't a single deal — it's the AI infrastructure buildout. Microsoft just guided $190 billion in capex; Meta is spending up to $145 billion. That capital is going into data centers, GPUs, power infrastructure, fiber, and cooling systems. Most of those assets don't exist at sufficient scale yet, so the fastest way to build capacity is to acquire it — which is exactly what SoftBank did with DigitalBridge, what Amazon did with Globalstar's ground infrastructure, and what the BlackRock/MGX consortium did with Aligned Data Centers. In an interview, frame it this way: "The hyperscaler capex cycle is creating an M&A wave two layers down the stack — in the infrastructure and industrial assets that support AI compute. That's where I see the most interesting deal activity heading into year-end." That shows you're synthesizing earnings data into a coverage thesis, not just reciting headlines. Bloomberg ↗