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The Most Important Deal of the Year Is…

No, it’s not Twitter, or a fantasy Pinterest or Peloton deal. Instead, it’s a software L.B.O. that will dictate everything in the current deal desert.

robert f. smith
Robert F. Smith, C.E.O. of Vista Equity Partners. Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
August 31, 2022

On January 31, a deeply unsexy but supremely important Wall Street deal was quietly announced. Vista Equity Partners, the mighty private-equity firm founded by the controversial Robert Smith, and an affiliate of Elliott Management, the activist hedge fund known for muscling once upon a time into Twitter and AT&T, joined together to buy Citrix, a publicly traded software specialist, and have plans to merge it with Tibco, an existing Vista portfolio company. The two firms agreed to pay $104 per share in cash for Citrix, a 30 percent premium to where the company’s stock price was trading prior to the announcement. The total value of the deal is around $17.3 billion.