Robinhood seeks a $35 billion valuation in its I.P.O.

breaking

Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of Robinhood.
Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Robinhood disclosed the expected price range for its initial public offering on Monday, putting the popular stock-trading app one step closer to itself trading on the markets.

In an updated prospectus, Robinhood said it planned to sell shares at $38 to $42 each. At the midpoint of that range, it would raise $2.2 billion and be valued at about $33 billion; at the high end, it would be worth about $35 billion.

The announcement will formally kick off the final part of Robinhood’s long road to going public: a roadshow where the company will pitch prospective investors on itself. It is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq market by the end of next week.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.

Bill Ackman in 2018. He said the Universal Music deal’s “complexity and structure” had concerned some investors in his special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Credit…Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

The billionaire investor Bill Ackman said Monday he had pulled back from a plan to use his jumbo-sized SPAC to purchase a stake in Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record label, after the Securities and Exchange Commission raised concerns about the complex transaction.

Under the proposed deal, Mr. Ackman’s special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, would have purchased a 10 percent stake in Universal Music, the label behind Taylor Swift, Lil Wayne and Lady Gaga, valuing the company at more than $40 billion.

But the deal would have been complicated, and the S.E.C. was concerned whether it qualified as a SPAC deal at all. These blank-check companies, which use capital from the public market to invest in a private company, taking it public in the process, have drawn a lot of attention from investors over the past year — and increasing regulatory scrutiny.

In a letter to investors, Mr. Ackman said the team at his investment company, Pershing Capital, had failed to change the agency’s mind about the multilayered deal. Investors in the SPAC, known as Pershing Capital Tontine Holdings, seemed wary, too: Its shares had lost nearly a fifth of their value since the deal was announced.

We underestimated the reaction that some of our shareholders would have to the transaction’s complexity and structure,” Mr. Ackman wrote.

The deal called for the Pershing Square Tontine to invest $4 billion for a 10 percent stake in Universal Music, which was already being taken public by its parent, Vivendi. That would have left $1.5 billion in the investment vehicle, which would have been rolled over into a new publicly traded acquisition fund that would have looked to do another deal. Existing investors in Pershing Square Tontine would have received a financial instrument that gave them the right to buy into yet another deal vehicle, which would seek its own takeover target.

While Mr. Ackman’s SPAC is stepping back from the Universal Music deal, Mr. Ackman is not — his hedge fund will buy the stake directly instead.

Pershing Square Tontine now has 18 months to find and close a new deal, unless shareholders give it more time, and “our next business combination will be structured as a conventional SPAC merger,” Mr. Ackman said.

A Saudi Aramco oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. A deal reached on Sunday by the countries in OPEC Plus could help ease the pressure on gas prices.
Credit…Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters

Major oil-producing nations have agreed to begin pumping more oil beginning next month, Stanley Reed reports in The New York Times.

The deal, reached on Sunday by the countries in a group known as OPEC Plus, could help ease the pressure on gas prices and inflation as economies around the world recover after pandemic lockdowns.

Gasoline prices in the United States have been steadily rising, and the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States is now $3.17, according to AAA. A year ago, as pandemic lockdowns kept people close to home, gas cost just $2.18 a gallon on average. And the higher gas prices have been adding to inflation, a key measure of which climbed at the fastest pace in 13 years in June.

Under the deal announced on Sunday, OPEC Plus, a group of 23 nations led by Saudi Arabia and including Russia, will increase output each month by 400,000 barrels a day, beginning in August. That will add about 2 percent to the world’s supply by the end of the year. The group accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world’s crude oil.

Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, questioned tariffs that the Trump administration placed on $360 billion of Chinese imports.
Credit…Erin Scott for The New York Times

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has cast doubt on the merits of the trade agreement between the United States and China, arguing that it has failed to address the most pressing disputes between the world’s two largest economies and warning that the tariffs that remain in place have harmed American consumers.

Ms. Yellen’s comments, made in an interview with The New York Times last week, come as the Biden administration is seven months into an extensive review of America’s economic relationship with China, write The Times’s Alan Rappeport and Keith Bradsher. The review must answer the central question of what to do about the deal that former President Donald J. Trump signed in early 2020 that included Chinese commitments to buy American products and reform its trade practices.

Tariffs that remain on $360 billion of Chinese imports are hanging in the balance, and the Biden administration has said little about the deal’s fate. President Biden has not moved to roll back the tariffs, but Ms. Yellen suggested that they were not helping the economy.

“Tariffs are taxes on consumers, in some cases it seems to me what we did hurt American consumers and the type of deal that the prior administration negotiated really didn’t address in many ways the fundamental problems we have with China,” she said.

But reaching any new deal could be hard given rising tensions between the two countries on other issues. The Biden administration warned U.S. businesses in Hong Kong on Friday about the risks of doing business there, including the possibility of electronic surveillance and the surrender of customer data to authorities.

Chinese officials would welcome any unilateral American move to dismantle tariffs, according to two people involved in Chinese policymaking. But China is not willing to halt its broad industrial subsidies in exchange for a tariff deal, they said.

Academic experts in China share the government’s skepticism that any quick deal can be achieved.

“Even if we go back to the negotiating table, it will be tough to reach an agreement,” said George Yu, a trade economist at Renmin University in Beijing.

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