DoorDash and Thrive Go Shopping

Get your deals in while ya still can, folks. And clearly, there are relative bargains to be had.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu gets what I’m talking about. On Thursday, Xu finally picked up Instacart, with Xu’s company saying it would pay about $17 billion for the grocery-delivery business. Over on X, Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta sent up a resounding huzzah, saying he and Xu had long discussed such a transaction. That wasn’t news to readers of The Information: We reported on talks between DoorDash and Instacart back in 2021.

At one point in 2021, DoorDash was considering buying Instacart for more than $40 billion. By waiting, Xu obviously saved himself a bunch of money and avoided the ridiculous markups that were attached to pandemic-era darlings like Instacart. Sure, its prospects seemed rosier back then, when we were regarding physical grocery stores as potentially lethal germ pools, but Xu doesn’t seem to be getting a total lemon. In the third quarter, Instacart sales grew 17%, and it generated a decent amount of cash in that time—more than $300 million, a 13% increase.

The sale to Xu does solve Instacart’s leadership problem: It had looked rather rudderless since Fidji Simo left the CEO role for OpenAI in 2025. Still, Xu will need to figure out how to handle the fierce competition for online grocery sales, a battle that includes Walmart and Amazon (more on the latter company below).

One thing that held Xu up in 2021 was concern about the Biden administration. According to Valida’s reporting, Xu figured DoorDash wouldn’t get an Instacart acquisition past Biden regulators, who, of course, were trying their hardest to squelch corporate mergers and acquisitions. Those days of dealmaking famine have given way to a time of great feasting: The Trump White House has been, uh, lenient with regulatory approval. It could all shift once again after the midterms. With Democrats seemingly set to retake Congress next week, and President Donald Trump enjoying the same popularity as a DoorDasher who shows up with a carton of broken eggs, the idea of a liberal in the White House after 2028 seems a lot more plausible than it did even a few months ago.

The prospect of a Democrat in the White House will spur plenty more M&A to happen sooner rather than later. I get it. Judging by the words of liberal standard-bearer Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, the left’s attitude toward mergers does not seem to have changed much since President Joe Biden creaked out of office. On Thursday, Mamdani criticized the DoorDash-Instacart deal, saying in a post on X that such moves often bring higher prices for consumers and “harsher exploitation” for workers.

In addition to politics, M&A sure seems likely to keep humming for the simple reason that there are plenty of other Instacarts out there—businesses that haven’t fared well since their pandemic glory days. Zoom, Duolingo, Coursera: I could go on. I would’ve put Bumble right there, too, had it not already limped into the welcoming arms of investor Ravi Gupta several weeks ago. (Gupta bought Bumble for about $6 a share; Bumble once traded hands at more than $75.) Other M&A action seems like it’ll be driven by the chance to spruce up an aging business with AI, which I imagine is the motivating force behind the other deal announced on Thursday: Josh Kushner’s $7.6 billion purchase of ADT, maker of home security systems, through the newly formed Thrive Holdings, an offshoot of his Thrive Capital.

Another reason that I’m going on and on about M&A today is because I listened to what Goldman Sachs’ Kim Posnett, the bank’s global co-head of investment banking, had to say about the topic at our WTF conference earlier this week. By the sounds of things, her direct messages are cluttered with missives from deal-hungry CEOs.

“They’re talking about M&A to drive growth. They’re talking about M&A to help reposition themselves in this new AI landscape. CEOs are leaning in right now—they wanna make big strategic bets,” she said. “We’re optimistic.” Still, as she pointed out, “things change quickly.”—Abram Brown

Amazon’s Agita

If there’s a lesson in the earnings reports from Amazon and Google over the past couple of days, it’s that investors are more in the mood to focus on the companies’ blemishes rather than the strong performance of their cloud units.

On Thursday, Amazon said revenues from its Amazon Web Services unit had surged 39% to $45.98 billion, its strongest growth rate in nearly four years. That was an impressive feat given that second-quarter AWS revenues grew at a record 37%. And if that wasn’t enough, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy forecast AWS growth rates of over 40% in 2027 and 2028.

On a call with analysts, Jassy went even further and predicted that AWS could be one of two businesses for Amazon with $1 trillion a year revenue within the next five to 10 years (the other is its stores business—Amazon-speak for its e-commerce business and everything else, excluding AWS).

But, it turns out, that was not enough for investors, many of whom are increasingly on edge about whether tech giants will see a sustainable payoff from the colossal amounts of money they’re spending on AI. Amazon shares dropped more than 6% in after-hours trading.

The company’s total net sales were $201.9 billion, up 12%, while its net income was $20.7 billion, down slightly from a year earlier, when it had a pre-tax gain of $9.5 billion from its investment in Anthropic. Even though Amazon’s numbers were within its own forecasts, Wall Street analysts were expecting slightly better results. The company left its estimate for its 2026 capital expenditures—most of which is going to its spending on data centers—unchanged at $220 billion.

Google had a similar experience today. Investors punished its stock, sending it down 12%. It appears they were more keen to focus on the bad in its Wednesday earnings report (sluggish revenue growth in its core search advertising business) rather than the good (a doubling of Google Cloud revenues). The AI glass seems to be half full for many investors right now.—Nick Wingfield