SpaceX Said to File Confidentially for IPO Before AI Rivals

Summary

Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast Summary

Episode Title: SpaceX Said to File Confidentially for IPO Before AI Rivals
Date: April 1, 2026
Hosts: Paul Sweeney and Scarlet Fu
Context: The episode dives into major investment news and in-depth company research, covering high-profile M&A, strategic industry moves, banking sector initiatives, and trends impacting Wall Street.

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Episode Overview

This Bloomberg Intelligence episode explores significant corporate actions and strategies shaping several key sectors. Analysts and reporters dissect headline-making M&A deals, emerging trends in tech and health care, and major banking initiatives aimed at community development and growth. The episode focuses on Unilever and McCormick's transformational merger, strategic acquisitions in pharmaceuticals, Nvidia’s ecosystem expansion, and JP Morgan’s ambitious American Dream Initiative, contextualizing each with in-depth analysis and market implications.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Unilever and McCormick $44.8 Billion Foods Merger

Guest: Diana Gomes, Senior Equity Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence
Segment Start: [01:32]

• Deal Purpose & Strategy
  • The merger combines McCormick's natural ingredients expertise with Unilever’s iconic food brands and protein-rich product portfolio, targeting scale advantages and access to new markets, especially outside India.
    • Quote: "It is really a combination of bringing the expertise from McCormick on the natural ingredients side of things with Unilever's food's iconic brands..." — Diana Gomes [01:59]
• Investor Skepticism & Risks
  • McCormick's shares drop 3.7% amid concerns about execution risk and the challenges of delivering expected growth targets (3-5% growth by year three, up from 2%).
    • Quote: "The execution risk is quite high and it's going to be a much more complex organization..." — Diana Gomes [02:47]
• Unilever’s Strategic Shift
  • Unilever focuses more on personal care and wellness—categories less affected by pricing pressures and macro risks. The food business split accelerates CEO Fernando Fernandez's long-term vision.
    • Quote: "It's really been focusing more in the personal care, well being categories which tend to be less price elastic..." — Diana Gomes [03:37]
• Impacts on Food Industry Rivals
  • The deal is expected to alter competitive dynamics for global giants like Nestlé and Kraft Heinz, especially given the increased strength in both consumer and food-service segments.
    • Quote: "Definitely it's going to build their competitive force compared to rivals in that space as well." — Diana Gomes [04:43]
• Market Reaction and Skepticism
  • Unilever shares fall by 5.5%. Concerns focus on the split’s terms (mostly stock, ~$16B in cash for a $22B revenue business) and the timing amidst global uncertainty.
    • Quote: "It's not going to be a clear cut exit and it also comes at the time of heightened uncertainty." — Diana Gomes [05:26]

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2. Pharmaceutical’s New Moves: Eli Lilly and Biogen

Guest: Sam Fazelli, Director of Research for Global Industries & Senior Pharma Analyst
Segment Start: [07:06]

• Eli Lilly Acquires Sentessa Pharmaceuticals
  • Acquisition brings in a sleep disorder drug targeting the orexin pathway (not a sedative like Ambien) as a “nice to have” pipeline add-on. The $6B deal is relatively small compared to Lilly’s massive revenue stream and future projections (potential $150B+ revenue a decade out).
    • Quote: “6 billion is, you know, I don't know, a week's worth of cash flow for Lilly...doesn't make a huge difference, but it's a nice little add on.” — Sam Fazelli [07:31]
• Lilly’s Pipeline Strategy
  • Unlike defensive deals at Merck (to cover patent cliffs), this is seen as an offensive move to gradually build the pipeline and prepare for future patent expirations.
    • Quote: “Lilly's doing exactly what he should be doing, just slowly padding its pipeline, adding more into it.” — Sam Fazelli [09:18]
• Patent Expiry Patterns
  • When drugs go off-patent, sales follow predictable declines: gradual at first, then sharply after generics enter—timing and severity vary for small molecules vs. biologics.
    • Quote: “A little drop, six months later, catastrophic drop." — Sam Fazelli [10:22]
• Biogen’s $5.6B Apellis Acquisition
  • Apellis fits the new CEO's pivot toward immunology and rare diseases, reinforcing strategic expansion beyond neurology.
    • Quote: "It fits in with what the new CEO... has been saying about where he sees the company going." — Sam Fazelli [11:43]

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3. Tech Sector Shakeups: Nvidia’s Expansion & Marvell Partnership

Guest: Mandeep Singh, Global Tech Research Head, Bloomberg Intelligence
Segment Start: [13:52]

• Nvidia Takes $2B Stake in Marvell
  • For Nvidia, the investment is minor but central to expanding its GPU ecosystem reach, enabling compatibility with Marvell’s custom networking chips (used by Amazon, etc.).
    • Quote: "Not meaningful for Nvidia. Their playbook right now is to create an EcoSystem where Nvidia GPUs are pervasive, everyone uses them in some capacity." — Mandeep Singh [14:33]
• Industry Effects & Competitive Positioning
  • Nvidia’s strategy ensures its GPUs are indispensable for public cloud and enterprise customers—even in walled-off ecosystems like Google/Broadcom’s TPU stack.
    • Quote: "You'll be able to improve the performance slightly for your chip relative to what Google TPUs will be able to do...these small increments is what has really kept Nvidia in the lead." — Mandeep Singh [16:12]
• Valuation Takes
  • Nvidia termed “cheap stock”—trades at 20 times earnings despite its dominance.
    • Quote: “It's not an expense, it's a cheap stock. 20 times earnings. Nvidia, that's a cheap stock.” — Paul [17:17]

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4. Banking Initiatives: JP Morgan’s American Dream Initiative

Guest: Hannah Levitt, Senior Finance Reporter, Bloomberg News
Segment Start: [18:43]

• Program Overview
  • JP Morgan’s American Dream Initiative, a $80B+ commitment over 10 years, targets local community development—focusing first on small business lending, with a goal to boost small business clients from 7M to 10M.
    • Quote: "They'll be investing $80 billion over 10 years in lending to small businesses." — Hannah Levitt [18:58]
• Competitive Landscape
  • JP Morgan aims to reinvigorate its retail/small business banking, competing with major banks (Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo) but also working alongside regional and local banks.
    • Quote: "It's kind of everyone...in some sense it's not an effort to kind of take out the community banks. It's more an effort to, you know, grow the pie for everyone." — Hannah Levitt [21:19]
• Branch Strategy & Banking Trends
  • Despite digital banking trends, JP Morgan continues to expand its physical branches (the only bank in all lower 48 states), seeing them as a mix of service hub and branding/advertising.
    • Quote: "Jamie Dimon...has always been a big believer in the power of the branch. And so they kind of zigged when the rest of the industry zagged a bit..." — Hannah Levitt [22:09]
• Sector Sentiment
  • Optimism is high for big banks due to deregulation and growth opportunities, with banks regaining ground in areas like private credit.
    • Quote: "They're definitely enthused about the level of deregulation and the ability to chip back away at the areas that non banks have chipped away at..." — Hannah Levitt [23:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Execution risk is quite high and it’s going to be a much more complex organization…” — Diana Gomes [02:47]
• “6 billion is…a week's worth of cash flow for Lilly…a nice little add on.” — Sam Fazelli [07:31]
• “It's not an expense, it's a cheap stock. 20 times earnings. Nvidia, that's a cheap stock.” — Paul [17:17]
• “It's kind of everyone...it's not an effort to take out the community banks. It's more an effort to…grow the pie for everyone.” — Hannah Levitt [21:19]
• “Jamie Dimon…has always been a big believer in the power of the branch.” — Hannah Levitt [22:09]

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Timestamps of Important Segments

| Time | Topic | Guest/Host | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------|--------------------------| | 01:32 | Unilever–McCormick Foods Merger | Diana Gomes | | 07:06 | Pharma M&A: Eli Lilly, Biogen | Sam Fazelli | | 13:52 | Nvidia/Marvell Deal & Tech Sector Outlook | Mandeep Singh | | 18:43 | JP Morgan’s American Dream Initiative | Hannah Levitt |

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a deep dive into some of the biggest moves in finance, tech, and consumer goods, providing actionable intelligence and context for investors and industry watchers. From high-stakes M&A and the evolving AI hardware arms race to bold banking strategies, the episode encapsulates the competitive dynamics shaping the future of Wall Street and beyond.

Transcript

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[Paul]

Lots of corporate actions in the marketplace today. Lots and a activity and in a packaged goods space. One of the giants out there, Unilever, the food business for Unilever is going to join with McCormick in a $44.8 billion transaction. We want to break down this deal. Diana Gomes joins us. Bloomberg Intelligence Senior equity Analyst Diana, what's, what's the strategy here of these two companies in combining their food businesses?

[Diana Gomes]

Hi. Thank you. It is really a combination of bringing the expertise from McCormick on the natural ingredients side of things with Unilever's food's iconic brands and in that protein rich toppings. It's one of the areas where it makes sense to combine for that added scale and also reaching markets that McCormick doesn't have access at the moment, particularly in emerging markets. If we exclude India, which is out of the equation in this, in this

[Christina Raffini]

combination we're seeing shares of McCormick fall 3.7%. What might investors be skeptical of in this combination?

[Diana Gomes]

It is a really transformational deal for McCormick. It is quite a sizable group of assets that they are taking in. So the execution risk is quite high and it's going to be a much more complex organization to really push through the sales growth Targets that they are envisioning for 3 to 5% by year three of the combination compared to about 2% where the companies have been growing to in terms of these foods business. So it would be quite a lot of work to get there

[Paul]

before Unilever here. Where do they want to focus going forward?

[Diana Gomes]

Unilever has been Unilever, Unilever depending in the country. It's really been focusing more in the personal care well being categories which tend to be less price elastic as well. It's something that can bode well given the geopolitical macroeconomic risk environments we are sitting on. But even before that this was the strategy for Fernando Fernandez was bringing that side of the business, making it a much larger proportion of Unilever's revenue as well. So this split would fast forward that plan even though it we are at least one year to go for the expected completion date.

[Christina Raffini]

Diana, what does this combination mean for the other big food companies globally? For the Nestle for instance, for Kraft Heinz which decided not to split up its businesses as it had once been entertaining under its new CEO.

[Diana Gomes]

One of the interesting parts of this combination of McCormick with Unilever Foods is also beyond the consumer facing business but also the food service. So they bring strength from both. So definitely it's going to build their competitive force compared to rivals in that space as well.

[Paul]

So I'm just looking at Unilever down five and a half percent today, down 12% year to date. It's at a 52 week low here. What's the call around this stock? What's the challenge for this, for this stock? Is it just simply the group consumer products or is there something specific to the company?

[Diana Gomes]

There is definitely some skepticism about the terms of the way the foods business is going to be split. So we are seeing some reaction today to that. It's a deal that is stock heavy. It's mostly stock. The cash consideration is only 7 the $16 billion or thereabouts for a business that was generating about $22 billion in revenue. So there is some skepticism from that perspective. It's not going to be a clear cut exit and it also comes at the time of heightened uncertainty. So I believe that's all playing out a little bit in that sense.

[Christina Raffini]

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Int coming up after this. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award winning journalist and I've got a new podcast Leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I'VE always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way

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[Paul]

A lot of M and A in the marketplace today, particularly in the health care space. What else is new there? But let's break it down with the resident expert Sam Fazelli, director of research for Global Industries and a senior pharmaceuticals analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. He is based in London. Sam, let's start with Eli Lilly. They're acquiring Sentessa Pharmaceuticals. Who is Sentessa and why is Lilly making this acquisition?

[Sam Fazelli]

So Sentessa is a company developing a sleeping sleep disorder product. So it's a novel mechanism of action, not entirely novel because there's already a drug on the market that targets the same mechanism or xin pathway in the brain. But it's not the usual kind of drowsy type of drug that puts you to sleep like the ambience of this world. It's not at all the same mechanism of action. So here's a drug that's in development for those for that indication. And we have a proof of concept already on a product on the market, not necessarily flying off the shelves, but doing fine. And so here comes Lily with a neuroscience business and it's a bolt on to their business. I mean, 6 billion is, you know, I don't know, a week's worth of cash flow for, for Lilly. I have to do the math. So don't, please multiply that by 54 and tell me, Sam, you got it wrong. But it's not a lot of money. I mean the interesting thing, Paul, is this with if you look at our analyst forecasts in MODL or consensus forecast is around the $2 billion business in 2020, 2033, 2034. Guess what? Lilly's top line revenue would be at that point approaching 150 billion. Of course, this is seven or eight years away, so it's probably all wrong. Nevertheless, that's what consensus has got. So doesn't make a huge difference, but it's a nice little add on.

[Christina Raffini]

Okay, so it sounds like this is a nice to have, not a need to have. We've seen companies like Merck make a lot of acquisitions because Merck faces patent expiration on some of its best selling drugs like Keytruda. Lilly is not in that position, is it? So this feels like it's very offensive rather than defensive.

[Sam Fazelli]

Yeah, I mean, pharma companies tend to scrabble or scramble, sorry at the end in the final yards of the, of the, of the game to try and get their pipelines all organized so that they can cope with it. You know, it takes time to develop these franchises. So Lilly's doing exactly what he should be doing, just slowly padding its pipeline, adding more into it. Now, how do you manage to deal with a drug or a drug group that is going to go off patent at some point and you're selling 100 billion of it? I think it's very hard to know which one of these drugs is going to be there. But you need a lot of products to be able to backfill that. And at some point people will start worrying about that. But it's way too soon for us to worry about that with Lilly. Let's just see how they do with the current business that they have in terms of the growth that they're getting.

[Paul]

Sam, when a drug goes off patent, what's the timeframe for sales to fall and to what degree do they fall? Is there a predictable pattern?

[Sam Fazelli]

Yes, there is. And we have blueprints that we follow when we're doing all our modeling. It depends on what sort of deals they might have done. So as you know, Paul, we have a very strong patent team led by Ord Gerspacker in our group and they've done some work on some of these drugs. You know, where people expect Keytruda, from Merck, for instance, to, to expire in 2029, they're thinking, thinking 2033. Right. So there's room for companies to push these things out a little bit, but eventually they happen. If you're a small molecule, you tend to give, have some exclusivity. With one generic company, which is legal, they have a six month exclusivity period when they launch, they make a lot of money by dropping the price a little bit. That six month ends and suddenly you get 10 of those drugs, the small molecule type pills that we all swallow, that's the pattern. A little drop, six months later, catastrophic drop. So and then the companies themselves make branded generics, etc. To keep some of that biologics a little bit different because it's harder to make them. And sometimes it's more complicated to make sure that you got the right bits and bobs in there, so a little bit smoother.

[Christina Raffini]

Sam, before we let you go, got to ask you about Biogen buying a pellet for 5.6 billion. If a Lilly acquisition for 7.8 billion is kind of a drop in the bucket for that company, meaningful is this acquisition for Biogen?

[Sam Fazelli]

Yeah, clearly a lot bigger for Biogen on a relative basis in terms of market cap or money expenditure. But it fits in with what the new CEO Christopher Becker has been saying about where he sees the company going. Company was broadly viewed as a neurology business as a company that's focused on neurodiseases and I think they're pivoting to call it an immunology and rare diseases. Now Neurology still fits in there. A lot of the disease drugs that you're using for neurology in multiple sclerosis, et cetera do target the immune system because they're autoimmune diseases. So but rare diseases, sure, you get some neurological diseases that are rare so you could treat them there. So it fits in this, in that bucket. And I think Apelis is a, is a, is a reasonable fit from that strategy perspective.

[Paul]

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[Christina Raffini]

Let's switch gears and take a look at what's happening in the tech sector in video. It feels like it's been quiet of late, but it is taking a $2 billion stake in Marvell Technology and it's deepening an existing partnership that it has with that company. Mandeep Singh is our global TEC research head here at Bloomberg Intelligence. Mandeep, how meaningful is this for Marvell? How meaningful is this for Nvidia?

[Mandeep Singh]

I mean, at this point of time, I feel Nvidia may end up generating $150 billion in cash for 20, 20, 650 billion. So they keep giving, you know, 2, 3 billion to pretty much everyone.

[Christina Raffini]

Not meaningful for Nvidia.

[Mandeep Singh]

Not meaningful for Nvidia. And look, their playbook right now is to create an EcoSystem where Nvidia GPUs are pervasive, everyone uses them in some capacity. And in this case, Marvell is an ASIC chip maker that does a lot of networking work for an Amazon. So think of how Google has ramped up on Broadcom. Amazon similarly uses Marvell for their custom chip work, networking, etc. So by Nvidia, by giving Marvell $2 billion, is saying, hey, we want to integrate with your ecosystem and you know, we'll make Nvidia GPUs compatible with whatever custom chips that you have. And that is their best way of, you know, really spreading their tentacles in terms of enterprise public cloud providers. Even though it's Amazon has their custom chips, Nvidia is finding a way to, you know, sell something to their ecosystem.

[Paul]

Nvidia for, I guess calendar 26th. The fiscal 27 year forecast is $250 billion of EBITDA and CapEx. Get this, $7 billion. There's only, I think I might have more capex in 7 than Nvidia.

[Christina Raffini]

660 billion for the hyperscalers for this year.

[Mandeep Singh]

Nvidia is the beneficiary. They are the ones who are taking

[Paul]

the three guys sitting in garage. Is that Nvidia and they're just selling chips to everybody. It's unbelievable.

[Mandeep Singh]

They've been ahead and partly that has to do with what they did with Mellanox acquisition back in the day. It was a company like Marvell that they bought five, six years back, integrated it really well and they've just stayed ahead of everyone else, whether it's amd, intel or anyone else in terms of offering the best performance per watt, which is what everyone cares about in the world of AI and partnerships like this. Or even the Aqua hires that they made with Grok, you know, that $20 billion aqua hire, again, you know, Jensen is like three steps ahead of everyone in terms of thinking through what is coming next. And he's thinking about what is the bottleneck when it comes to AI performance. And he's saying it's memory. I mean, some of that has to do with, by creating an ecosystem, you'll be able to improve the performance slightly for your chip relative to what Google TPUs will be able to do with other chip providers. And these small increments is what has really kept Nvidia in the lead.

[Paul]

It's not an expense, it's a cheap stock. 20 times earnings. Nvidia, that's a cheap stock.

[Sam Fazelli]

Yeah.

[Paul]

Unbelievable.

[Christina Raffini]

So who has Nvidia not hooked up with? Who has Nvidia not partnered with yet?

[Mandeep Singh]

Right now it's a Google ecosystem, the Broadcom Google TPU ecosystem. I would say that's like a parallel alternative to Nvidia Stack. But again, do you see that?

[Christina Raffini]

Do you see there being any kind of synergy between those two at all? I mean, or are they just developing separately on their own paths?

[Mandeep Singh]

They. They are. I mean, Google TPU's are in their seventh version. So from that perspective, they have had a ton of progress on their own. But again, if you're an enterprise and you are using Nvidia GPUs, you want compatibility. And now it's inevitable that you will be using Nvidia GPUs in some form, given how spread Nvidia is at this point. They're like the intel, you know, 20 years back. I mean, they, everyone use, use to use Intel. Everyone is using Nvidia when it comes to AI now.

[Paul]

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.

[Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast Host]

You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10am Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcast or watch us live on YouTube.

[Paul]

JP Morgan, they announced something called the American Dream Initiative. I don't know what that is, but our next guest does. Hannah Levitt, senior finance reporter for Bloomberg News, joins us here in our studio. Hannah, what's JP Morgan Chase doing there with their American Dream Initiative?

[Sam Fazelli]

Yeah.

[Hannah Levitt]

Hey, so thanks for having me. Another initiative from JP Morgan. They've been, you know, kind of full of initiatives and acronyms lately. This one, American Dream Initiative, or adi, they're going to be investing in local communities across six areas and that includes small business and housing and financial health and, you know, a few others. And so what it is, is small business was the one that they focused on today in the announcement. And I think, you know, they'll be rolling out further announcements as this thing goes. But small business was the focus in today's announcement and for that they will be investing 80 billion over 10 years in lending to small businesses. They're trying to grow their roster of small business clients from 7 million today to 10 million. They're hiring a thousand more small business bankers. So they have 3,000 now. Yeah. So really just trying to dig deeper into communities and bring together business and in some cases philanthropy that they do

[Paul]

because of one of the many firms on Wall Street. I worked at JP Morgan back when they were the Chase Manhattan bank for the merger of JP Morgan. And they had a real small business retail focus. The Chase Manhattan bank did. And I felt like now that they merged with JP Morgan, that kind of got lost a little bit. You get a sense that they're trying to maybe reestablish that part of the business for themselves.

[Hannah Levitt]

Yeah, I mean they've stayed huge in the consumer side. Their credit card business is ginormous. They are the biggest bank mortgage lender. Of course we've had like the non banks grow in size of since the crisis, but so they're big across the consumer. But I think what they're trying to do here is they've had these targeted initiatives in places like Detroit where over the past, it's been over a decade now, it's been hundreds of million dollars that they've plowed into Detroit. And that's not, you know, some of it's flown through, but it's, it's business stuff where it's, you know, lending to affordable housing, things like that. But where they, they bring together, you know, various aspects of the behemoth that is JP Morgan to have this targeted effort in, you know, in that case Detroit. But now they're trying to kind of replicate and go beyond that in local

[Paul]

communities across the country is this, I mean, this feels like it's the business. I'm trying to think who they'd be really competing against. I think it's Citi bank of America. Those are the ones I think about retail consumer small business. Is that kind of who they're going to be going up against or increasing?

[Hannah Levitt]

It's kind of everyone. I mean, BofA and Wells Fargo are both big and small business. But then you also have the regional banks and even, you know, the more local community banks that are huge forces in their communities. Although, you know, in some sense it's not an effort to kind of take out the community banks. It's more an effort to, you know, grow the pie for everyone.

[Paul]

Interesting. Like, I wonder when I see a branch open up, particularly like the one just downstairs in our building here. I can think of the bank, what it is with all the technology when we do all of our banking. I can remember the last time I was in a branch because you can do everything on your phone, yet I see branches popping up left and right. What's the business strategy behind that? What did the banks tell you?

[Hannah Levitt]

It's funny because I have covered banking for eight years and I went into a branch recently and like got scared. I was like, I don't know how to be in here.

[Paul]

Right.

[Hannah Levitt]

But JP Morgan has really. Jamie Dimon, who's been CEO for more than 20 years at this point, has been always been a big believer in the power of the branch. And so they kind of zigged when the rest of the industry zagged a bit on the branch stuff and they've been adding branches for years and now they're in. They're the only bank to be in all lower 48 states, right?

[Diana Gomes]

Yeah.

[Paul]

So I kind of view it as advertising, if nothing else. I mean, again, I think it's a capital one. Downstairs in our building, they got a little cafe down there. People are in there. There's always a lot of people. So it feels like it's a billboard, a different type of outdoor advertising for these banks.

[Hannah Levitt]

But totally that's part of the thinking that I've heard from them and others is that it is advertising. And also they do some of these things that they're going to do, you know, as part of the American Dream initiative, but that they already do, like some coaching stuff and where there will be events at the branches and things like that.

[Paul]

So what's a big theme that you're working on just for the banks? It seems like they've got an administration that's supportive of the banking system in general and banks all over the place is this. Do you get a sense of optimism from the companies you cover?

[Hannah Levitt]

Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot going on in the world, but if you look beyond that for a minute, to the extent that you can. I mean, I wrote a story at the end of last year about how it was really banks fighting back against the buy side in private credit, where banks were growing their. The big banks were growing their loan books at the fastest rate since. In at least a decade. It may have been since pre crisis but, you know, so they're definitely enthused about the level of deregulation and the ability to kind of chip back away at the areas that non banks have chipped away at over the years.

[Paul]

Yes, I agree. I mean, God, we used to make a fortune off those syndicated loans we did back in the day.

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