Brex co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras.

Brex

Capital One said Thursday that it was acquiring payments startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the latest splashy deal undertaken by the bank’s CEO, Richard Fairbank.

The firm, which disclosed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings statement, said the deal is made up of 50% cash and 50% stock. Brex was previously valued at $12.3 billion.

Shares of the bank fell about 3%.

Under Fairbank, a rare founder-CEO of a major U.S. bank, Capital One acquired rival card firm Discover Financial last year for about $35 billion. That deal was Fairbank’s crowning achievement, giving the credit card lender access to one of the only payment networks of any scale.

“Since our founding, we set out to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution,” Fairbank said in a release. “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace.”

Fairbank said that Brex pioneered the combination of corporate cards, banking and spend management software: “They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.”

Still, the more than 50% decline in valuation for Brex from its 2023 level shows the headwinds that even successful fintech companies have encountered.

Brex is among a class of fintech firms that rose to prominence during a period of low interest rates; it was known initially as a startup that made loans to other startups via its cards.

But the company expanded beyond technology into other sectors and now services larger established firms and startups alike, including Robinhood, Zoom and Anthropic.

Capital One, which has offered business credit cards for decades, became increasingly convinced that it was Brex’s model that would be the winning offering, according to a person with knowledge of the lender’s strategy.

“We didn’t have to pursue this acquisition, our growth was incredibly strong,” Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi told CNBC in an interview.

Combining Brex’s technology with Capital One’s reach and resources would grow the startup’s scale faster than as a standalone firm, he said.

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David Solomon, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs.

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Goldmans Sachs on Monday said it agreed to buy Innovator Capital Management, a provider of defined-outcome ETFs, for about $2 billion in its latest deal to bolster the firm’s asset management division.

Goldman said the acquisition, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, will boost its ETF offerings in a fast-growing corner of the investing world.

Defined-outcome ETFs use contracts including options to buffer downside risks or offer targeted gains over set time periods. Innovator had $28 billion of assets under supervision across 159 ETFs as of Sept. 30.

“Active ETFs are dynamic, transformative, and one of the fastest-growing segments in today’s public investment landscape,” Goldman CEO David Solomon said in a news release announcing the deal. “By acquiring Innovator, Goldman Sachs will expand access to modern, world-class investment products.”

Goldman Sachs, which has made asset and wealth management a priority since pivoting away from a consumer banking push, has made a series of deals in the sector this year. In September, Goldman said it would invest $1 billion in T. Rowe Price, and the following month, the bank said it acquired venture capital investor Industry Ventures to bolster its alternative investments platform.

Goldman said Monday once the deal closes, Innovator’s 60-plus employees will join the bank’s asset management division.

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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.

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Meta said Tuesday that it formed a joint venture agreement with Blue Owl Capital in a deal worth $27 billion to fund and develop the social media company’s massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana.

As part of the deal, the asset management firm will own 80% of the joint venture, while Meta will retain a 20% stake and oversee the construction and property management services of the data center, which is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Blue Owl contributed about $7 billion in cash as part of the joint venture, while Meta received a one-time payout of $3 billion.

The partnership provides the “the speed and flexibility” Meta needs to build the data center and support its “long-term AI ambitions,” the social media company said in a statement.

Meta in December announced that it chose Louisiana to host what would be its largest data center. Construction of that facility, which is being built on a site the size of roughly 1,700 football fields, is expected to finish by 2030.

Local utility Entergy told CNBC in June that the new data center could consume about twice as much electricity as the city of New Orleans on a peak day.

Meta has been spending heavily on artificial intelligence amid a broader race with other tech giants like Alphabet and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which are also developing gigantic data centers to power future AI models.

OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank in January formed the Stargate joint venture that will see the companies invest $500 billion to develop data centers over the coming years. The first Stargate data center site came online in September 180 miles west of Dallas in Abilene, Texas.

Last week, Google said that it would invest $15 billion on a data center project in southern India that will be the search giant’s largest AI hub in the world outside of the U.S.

WATCH: A rotation out of the US is a bet against the AI trade.

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Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) nominee for US President Donald Trump, during a Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. 

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new leadership on Thursday dismissed at least four enforcement lawsuits undertaken by the previous administration’s director.

In legal filings, the CFPB issued a notice of voluntary dismissal for cases involving Capital One; Berkshire Hathaway-owned Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance; a Rocket Cos. unit called Rocket Homes Real Estate; and a loan servicer named Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency.

“The Plaintiff, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dismisses with prejudice this action against all Defendants,” the agency said in the Capital One case. It used similar language in the other cases.

The moves are the latest sign of the abrupt shift at the agency since acting CFPB Director Russell Vought took over this month. In conjunction with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the CFPB has shuttered its Washington headquarters, fired about 200 employees and told those who remain to stop nearly all work.

Under former Director Rohit Chopra, the CFPB accused Capital One of bilking customers out of more than $2 billion in interest; it said Vanderbilt ignored signs that customers couldn’t afford its mortgages; it accused Rocket of providing illegal kickbacks to real estate agents; and it said that loan servicer Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency improperly collected loans.

A Capital One spokesman said the bank welcomed the dismissal of its case, which it “strongly disputed.”

A spokesman for Rocket also lauded the news: “Rocket Homes has always connected buyers with top-performing agents based only on objective criteria like how well they helped homebuyers achieve their dream of homeownership. We are proud to put this matter behind us.”

Shares of Capital One and Rocket climbed after the dismissals.

Billions lost

Current and former CFPB employees have told CNBC that legal cases with upcoming docket dates would likely be dismissed as the agency disavows most of what Chopra has done.

That began late last week, when the agency dismissed its case against SoLo Funds, a fintech lender it had earlier accused of gouging customers.

Eric Halperin, the CFPB’s former head of enforcement, said in a phone interview Thursday that the spate of CFPB dismissals was unprecedented in the bureau’s history.

“Five cases have been dismissed so far by this administration, whereas in the entire history of the bureau, there’s only been one other case dismissed without relief for any consumers,” Halperin said.

On Friday, the CFPB also dropped its case against TransUnion that accused the credit agency of violating a 2017 order related to the company’s marketing of its credit tools to consumers.

“We are pleased with the dismissal of this case, which reflects our long-standing view of the facts and our ongoing work to support consumers,” a TransUnion spokesperson wrote in a statement to CNBC.

Since the recent cases were dismissed with prejudice, the CFPB has agreed to never bring these claims again, shutting off the possibility of clawing back funds for consumer relief, Halperin added.

“Just from the cases that were dismissed today, there’s billions of dollars in consumer harm that the CFPB will never be able to get back for consumers,” he said.

‘Embarrass you’

The Thursday filings began appearing at the same time that senators were grilling Jonathan McKernan, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CFPB on a permanent basis, during a nomination hearing.

“Mr. McKernan, literally while you’ve been sitting here and you’ve been talking about the importance of following the law, we get the news that the CFPB is dropping lawsuits against companies that are cheating American families, or alleged to be cheating American families,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said.

“It seems to me the timing of that announcement is designed to embarrass you,” Warren said.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

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Bluebird Bio will sell itself to private equity firms Carlyle and SK Capital for about $30 million, the company said Friday, marking the end of the Bluebird’s fall from the one of the buzziest biotech firms to one that was on the cusp of running out of money.

Bluebird’s shareholders will receive $3 per share with the possibility of getting another $6.84 a share if Bluebird’s gene therapies reach $600 million in sales in any 12-month period by the end of 2027. Bluebird shares closed at $7.04 on Thursday. They fell 40% on Friday after the company announced the sale.

For more than thirty years, Bluebird has been at the forefront of creating one-time treatments that promised to cure genetic diseases. At one point, Bluebird’s market cap hovered around $9 billion as investors bought into the idea that the company could find success with its gene therapies. It’s fallen under $41 million after the company faced several scientific setbacks, separated its cancer work into another company and fell into financial despair.

The turning point came in 2018, when Bluebird flagged that a patient who received its gene therapy for sickle-cell disease developed cancer. Bluebird concluded its treatment didn’t cause the condition, but the revelation started a series of questions surrounding the safety of its DNA-altering treatments.

Bluebird also faced pushback from European payers after pricing its gene therapy for blood disorder beta thalassemia, called Zynteglo, at $1.8 million per patient. The company withdrew the treatment from Europe in 2021, just two years after it was approved there. Bluebird said it would instead focus on the U.S., where it was readying for the approval of Zynteglo for beta thalassemia, Lyfgenia for sickle cell disease, as well as another therapy Skysona for a rare brain disease called cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy.

All three of those gene therapies were approved in recent years, but none of them have been able to ease Bluebird’s financial woes. The company had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Offloading Bluebird’s cancer treatments into new company 2Seventy Bio also eliminated an important source of revenue.

At last update in November, Bluebird said its cash would fund the company’s operations into the first quarter of this year. The sale marks a stark reversal of Bluebird’s past performance. The upfront price of about $30 million is a fraction of the $80 million Bluebird’s former Chief Executive Officer Nick Leschly made from selling the company’s stock during his time there.

And it’s at odds with the transformative results that most patients see with the company’s treatments. This reporter has spoken to patients who were desperate for the chance to receive Zynteglo, as well as a then-10-year-old girl who felt fortunate to become the first person in the U.S. to receive the treatment after it was approved.

The entire field is facing tough questions right now about whether companies can translate the promise of one-time treatments for rare diseases into viable businesses. Vertex‘s competing gene therapy for sickle cell disease, Casgevy, has seen a similarly slow launch. Pfizer on Thursday announced it would stop selling a gene therapy for hemophilia that was approved only one year ago, citing weak demand.

Bluebird’s treatments could still change many lives. They just weren’t enough to change the company’s fate.

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