📰On The Record – 7th August 2026

easyJet agreed to a £5.7 billion takeover by US private equity giant Apollo, ending a months-long tug-of-war after rival bidder Castlelake dropped out. The deal, worth 715p a share, has the blessing of founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose family is rolling its stake into the new private structure instead of cashing out. It means easyJet exits the London Stock Exchange entirely, joining a growing club of UK-listed companies going private. The bigger story here isn't one airline — it's what happens to public markets when the biggest, most recognisable names keep quietly heading for the exit.

The UK government gave the green light to Paramount's $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, after Paramount agreed to legally binding promises: keeping Channel 5 as a public service broadcaster until 2034, protecting its editorial independence, and ring-fencing UK content and children's programming budgets. With UK and EU approval now secured, one of media's biggest mergers is edging toward the finish line — though a coalition of US states is still fighting it on competition grounds. It's a reminder that even in an era of global media consolidation, national regulators still hold real cards.

The trend: public companies, easyJet included, are increasingly opting to leave stock exchanges behind for private equity ownership.

The case for it is straightforward — PE money comes with fewer quarterly-earnings pressures, more room to make long-term bets, and often a premium price for existing shareholders on the way out.

The case against it is just as real: these deals are frequently funded with substantial debt, reduce public transparency, and hand control to firms whose main obligation is to their own investors, not the public interest.

Whether this trend has real staying power depends on whether cheap-ish debt stays available and whether public markets keep feeling like more trouble than they're worth for big companies. Either way, it says something uncomfortable about how much faith big business currently has in being watched.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warned that record levels of market leverage — much of it hidden outside the obvious places — are raising the odds of a sudden, sharp market shock. Speaking to CNBC, he said the risk isn't confined to traditional margin debt; it's baked into hedge funds, prime brokerages, ETFs and Treasury trading strategies too, meaning one overextended player could rattle the whole system. Dimon stopped short of predicting a full-blown crisis. But when the head of America's biggest bank starts talking about borrowing you can't see, it's worth paying attention — because by the time it's visible, it's already too late to do much about it.

Fridays are for looking back before you look forward — and most founders never build in the time to actually do it. This prompt turns the last five days into a quick, structured debrief so you walk into the weekend clear-headed and walk into Monday with intent, instead of just reacting to whatever lands in your inbox first.

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OpenAI asked a US federal judge to throw out Apple's trade secrets lawsuit, arguing it's a smokescreen for Apple's struggles to keep AI talent and keep pace on artificial intelligence. Apple claims OpenAI and former staff misused confidential information; OpenAI says Apple hasn't named a single stolen secret. It's the latest flare-up in a rivalry that's less about lawsuits and more about who controls the next generation of consumer hardware — and it's not going away quietly.

More than 200 major companies, including Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, CME Group and Moody's, were targeted in a coordinated month-long hacking campaign using old-fashioned phone-based social engineering. Attackers posed as IT support, tricked employees onto fake login pages, and stole passwords and authentication codes — with some victims reportedly paying up. It's a blunt reminder that even the world's most sophisticated financial institutions can be undone by someone simply picking up the phone and sounding convincing.

France submitted a $34 billion proposal to sell India 114 Rafale fighter jets, complete with local manufacturing and technology transfer under India's "Make in India" push. Final pricing talks are still to come, but if it lands, it would be one of the largest defence deals in the world and would deepen a strategic partnership that's been building for years. For India, it's as much an industrial and diplomatic play as a military one.

OpenAI's debut hardware product is shaping up to be a screen-free, doughnut-shaped AI speaker priced above $300, designed with former Apple design chief Jony Ive. Packed with cameras and sensors, it's built to act as an always-on AI companion — answering questions, controlling smart homes, playing media — with a 2027 launch targeted. It's OpenAI's clearest signal yet that it doesn't just want to power your apps; it wants a physical seat on your kitchen counter.

SpaceX is planning natural gas power plants to supply its huge Terafab semiconductor complex in Texas, which will produce chips for SpaceX, Tesla and other AI ventures. Rather than rely on the strained public grid, SpaceX is building its own dedicated energy supply. It's the clearest sign yet that AI's appetite for computing power has become an energy problem first and a technology problem second — and the biggest players are no longer waiting for utilities to catch up.

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Every founder says culture is the most important thing they're building, right up until it's time to actually build it — because culture isn't a Slack channel or a values poster, it's what happens when nobody senior is in the room. Most companies default to whatever behaviour goes unpunished, and call that culture by accident. The businesses that actually get it right treat culture the same way they treat product: iterated on deliberately, measured honestly, and owned by someone whose job depends on it — not bolted on after the fact when retention starts slipping. Culture isn't what you say in the all-hands. It's what you tolerate when nobody's watching.

What it means: Leverage just means using borrowed money to make a bet bigger than your own cash could cover — a business (or a hedge fund, or you, with a mortgage) puts down a little and borrows the rest to boost potential returns. The catch is it boosts potential losses just as much. It's exactly what Jamie Dimon was warning about yesterday: when leverage is high across the system and hard to see, a small shock can turn into a much bigger one very quickly.

Around a year ago, President Trump signed an executive order adding a further 25% tariff on Indian goods — taking the total to 50%, the highest the US had imposed on any trading partner — over India's continued purchases of Russian oil. It came into effect later that month and put roughly $87 billion of Indian exports at risk. A year on, it's hard not to notice the echo: yesterday's news of France's $34 billion fighter jet pitch to India is partly a story about India diversifying its strategic relationships after a bruising year of trade friction with Washington. Tariffs don't just move prices — they move alliances.

As more household-name companies get taken private, who actually loses out when a business no longer has to answer to public shareholders, disclose its finances, or face scrutiny at an AGM?

Sit with both sides before you land anywhere — the efficiency argument and the accountability argument are both worth taking seriously.