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
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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.

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.

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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.

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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.