About — Deal Breakers

Every merger makes a promise. Some of them don't survive it. Deal Breakers investigates the deals that fell apart — and traces each one back to the financial decision that doomed it.

Most financial media covers M&A deals as business news — the announcement, the personalities, the headline number. Deal Breakers covers what comes after: the write-down, the collapsed synergy thesis, the goodwill impairment that signals a deal was broken at signing.

Each episode is a structured investigation: the original deal thesis, the financial warning signs visible in public filings before close, the missteps that compounded the risk, and a conclusion about where it all went wrong. Beyond the headlines to conclusions grounded in the evidence. That's what makes the analysis useful rather than just interesting.

The format is designed for people who want to understand corporate finance in the real world: through billion-dollar decisions that went catastrophically wrong.

New episode every week. The drama is real. So is the analysis underneath it.

The autopsy format

The pitch

What the deal thesis was and why it made sense on paper. Every catastrophic deal looked beautiful at the pitch stage. That's where the analysis starts.

The price

What was paid, what the assumptions were, where the premium came from. The acquisition price encodes all of the deal's optimism and most of its risk.

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The warnings

What the SEC proxy said. What the market priced in. What the analysts saw and chose to ignore. Every failed deal left a paper trail. This is where we read it.

The failure

How the loss actually happened, in financial terms. The goodwill write-down, synergy gap, debt spiral, integration collapse, or technology displacement.

The verdict

Not just a recap of the headlines, but clear conclusions about what actually went wrong and why. What the evidence says, where the deal broke down, and the decisions that got it there..

Who this is for

Investors

Understanding how acquirers destroy value is directly applicable to evaluating companies that make acquisitions. The patterns repeat.

Finance students

Real-world M&A case studies with primary source citations. Better than any textbook for understanding how deals actually work and fail.

Business owners

If you're ever buying or selling a business, understanding the mechanics of how large deals fail is directly applicable at any scale.

Curious adults

You don't need a finance background. Each term gets explained in plain language, when it first appears.