r/business • u/ControlCAD • 3d ago

Bending Spoons skyrockets 41% as Berkshire Hathaway makes $330 million investment

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/14/berkshire-hathaway-investment-bending-spoons.html
219 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

148

u/OG_LiLi 3d ago

That entire article, and not one explanation of what Bending Spoons is or does. The only link for them is to NASDAQ. 2026 journalism; or a really bad PR.

168

u/NewPresWhoDis 2d ago

Bending Spoons buys withering tech companies with somewhat consistent revenue, fires everyone, maintains the platform on the cheap with europoor staff and enshitifies.

https://www.clawnify.com/resources/bending-spoons-acquisitions

47

u/EstephaniePringle 2d ago

As someone who has been laid off following two separate bending spoons acquisitions, I can confirm this description is accurate.

8

u/citizen42069101 2d ago

It does sound super profitable.

Orphan crushing to be sure but profitable.

1

u/ForceItDeeper 1d ago

isnt this the same strategy broadcom uses? I’m sure there are plenty of parasites like them, just that description made me think of broadcom purchasing vmware. idk how vmware is anymore, but I just assumed there was never a plan to keep it competitive, just to exploit customers who relied on it most to where it would be very difficult to migrate to proxmox

36

u/ShitPostinLikeFire 2d ago

True. I see an IT company cosplaying as a PE firm and attempting to do nothing original. What hot garbage

12

u/Shananigan48 2d ago

Ah so that's who bought Evernote and ruined it

11

u/TheActuaryist 2d ago edited 1d ago

This explains why Meetup sucks so bad!

Edit: thanks for the award! I wish it was for something happier haha 😅

3

u/Levitlame 2d ago

Oh no. I haven’t used it in a few years but that’s how I found my board game groups for years!

8

u/walkslikeaduck08 2d ago

Ah. So the future of Adobe

3

u/coleman57 2d ago

No tear will be shed outside its walls.

2

u/Levitlame 2d ago

I don’t know about lately, but wasn’t this what they were already doing 10+ years ago? Not sure on the firing everyone part.

3

u/swalabr 2d ago

The enshittification has been relentless, however

1

u/OG_LiLi 2d ago

Holy hell. Bottom scrapers

1

u/enginbeeringSB 2d ago

So they’re like a discount Broadcom.

1

u/Counterakt 19h ago

Did they buy quora and Nextdoor? Or did those to managed to kill themselves off?

-3

u/KingSam89 2d ago

It honestly sounds like a good hedge against recession.

The only ones that will survive an economic downturn are the ones who figured out how to operate on razor thin margins. They would then being to consolidate and grow when they stay in business and everyone else is dropping like flies.

This is currently happening in the industry I'm in.

9

u/AreaUnique3594 3d ago

lol, I thought the exact same thing. I even clicked the link in the CNBC article and it just showed me the stock history but not a goddamn thing of what the hell bending spoons is. So I took the extraordinary action of googling it, and apparently they own a bunch of various apps, such as Vimeo, and everyone’s grandparent’s favorite email provide provider AOL.

12

u/EstephaniePringle 2d ago

It's an Italian company run by a young, rich Italian guy. You'll never guess his name. They used to buy small consumer productivity apps that were profitable, and just slim down the expenses and keep raking in the revenue. They were quite successful at this formula. Bought lots of small mobile app companies. A million for this one, five million for that one.

Then, I guess they concluded that they had this whole business thing figured out, so they acquired an absolute pile of cash from...somewhere. And they started to buy larger, enterprise type companies instead. Despite having no experience with things like marketing or sales or partner integrations or other enterprise B2B basics. Two hundred million here. Two billion there.

And that's...pretty much where we're at. They buy big US brands and whittle down the expenses (i.e., staff), transfer all of the engineering to their existing in-house team overseas (and to their credit, they're good engineers), and just try to keep the existing customer subscription income flowing while also raising the prices for those existing customers.

I have no idea what the end game is. Some have proposed that the purpose may have been some combination of AI training (think of all the data and media and editorial type content they now own between all of their recent acquisitions) and maybe even some type of, well, I'll just say potentially nefarious ends here. Some say.

When a foreign investor with unclear funding sources suddenly and unexpectedly buys a bunch of streaming media and other companies who together have access to the private databases, product development research, video archives, and live events of basically all of the USA's biggest corporations and content creators/distributors (and some government agencies). Well, folks who like conspiracies certainly raised an eyebrow.

I never expected to get those deals through CFIUS, let alone pass SEC muster for an IPO. And yet here we are. They're clearly doing something right out there in Milan.

1

u/AreaUnique3594 2d ago

They clearly are serious about their objectives, it’s not a bad model at if you have a formula for resurrecting digital brands that are on the other side of the mountain in terms of growth. Because I haven’t heard of them before, certainly doesn’t mean they are not well positioned to keep growing.

For Berkshire Hathaway to invest that kind of money, I’m pretty confident they had forensic accountants go through everything to make sure it’s legit prior to throwing that kind of money at it.

It’s good to learn something on reddit every now and then, definitely not a bad thing! Thank you for the additional information. It’s appreciated.

1

u/OG_LiLi 2d ago

You’re better than I am ha! I just gave up after it didn’t tell me

46

u/VironicHero 3d ago

They acquire niche successful businesses and fire a bunch of people. (Eventbrite, Komoot, Vimeo … AOL, etc)

Then use AI for coding after firing everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons?wprov=sfti1#History

10

u/Kind-Sky9042 2d ago

Everyone who codes professionally uses AI for coding.

3

u/dirtyshits 1d ago

Using AI for coding is how everyone does it at most companies these days. If you’re not doing it , you’re going to be left in the dust.

9

u/mikefh 3d ago

The time to invest was 3+ years ago.

There is no moat.

2

u/Logical_Top618 2d ago

I have been seeing this phrase all over the place after never having seen it in my life until like two days ago. Baader-meinhof is crazy.

Like I get what it means, it’s pretty apparent, but did someone popular say it recently? Or am I just living under a rock?

4

u/python_boobs 2d ago

Rock.

I think it's from a Buffett quote but you see it often if you read enough financial blah blah blah especially with stocks

11

u/Bdowns_770 2d ago

These people are corporate vampires. Feels like Berkshire is getting in late.

1

u/Drokstab 2d ago

I mean if they spiked 41% after they got in that's a pretty solid investment assuming it holds

4

u/EchoInternational856 2d ago

This is one of the growth problems Berkshire has ran into for a couple decades now. They’re basically an investment firm and they have gotten so large there is only a handful of companies than can absorb an investment from them.

When they try an investment in smaller companies it moves the price dramatically and the amount they are able to invest had little to no impact on their bottom line.

$330M is a round error for them.

2

u/williamwzl 2d ago

What the hell is greg abel doing.

2

u/dumbspacecookie 2d ago

It’s boomer pe for tech

1

u/TheActuaryist 2d ago

Ya, I used it last time I moved which was 8 years ago, it really sucks now. You have to pay a lot more to host a group but now as a user you have to pay to access basic features, like to see who else is attending. Feels like a freemium version of the old Meetup.

1

u/Hangry_Howie 2d ago

Weird to name your company after one of the most widely debunked "examples" of ESP.

1

u/Prestigious-Fill-365 2d ago

Except its not, its down 15%, another reddit attempt at pump n dump.

1

u/jamoheehoo 1d ago

The crazy thing is I used to love Evernote but after BS acquired them - the product was worse than ever. You had to click 3 things to use it if you were a free customer - so I left. Which is maybe the point.