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Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd expected to stay involved with company as part of deal

Bumble BMBL 21.26%increase; green up pointing triangle, the dating app founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd, is in advanced talks to be taken private in a deal that values it at roughly $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The details

The buyer is Ithaca Holdings, a firm founded recently by two Silicon Valley executives, the people said. Bumble would be one of the first major moves for Ithaca, which plans to apply advanced technologies including artificial intelligence to its investments.

Bumble had a market value of around $335 million as of Friday’s close. Its shares have dropped over 90% since it went public in 2021.

Wolfe Herd founded Bumble in 2014 after having co-founded Match Group’s Tinder. She is expected to roll at least part of her stake in the dating app as part of the deal and remain involved with the company, the people said.

Private-equity firm Blackstone was one of Bumble’s early backers and bought a majority stake in 2019. It sold much of its stake down following Bumble’s IPO but still owns a roughly 14% stake, according to FactSet.

A deal could come as soon as this week, assuming talks don’t fall apart.

The context

When Wolfe Herd founded Bumble, she sought to turn the traditional dating dynamic on its head by creating a platform on which women initiate conversations. The idea created buzz, with the company’s market value peaking at above $14 billion following its IPO.

But Bumble and other dating-app companies including Match Group have struggled as younger users are increasingly turned off by online dating platforms. Wolfe Herd returned as Bumble’s CEO in 2025, and a few months later the company laid off roughly 30% of its staff.

At Match, increased revenue from the dating app Hinge partly offset roughly flat revenue from Tinder, its largest app, in the second quarter. At Bumble, meanwhile, both Bumble and Badoo, the company’s other app, reported revenue drops. Both companies have been more deeply integrating AI into their businesses. In August, Bumble said it would drop its women-first messaging feature.

Ithaca, which says on its website its mission is to “use frontier technology to build products to meaningfully improve people’s lives,” was founded by Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman. Gupta is a partner at venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital and the former chief financial officer of Instacart. Hegeman is a former executive of Meta, where he was most recently chief revenue officer.

Trillionaire Tesla chief has become party’s biggest donor ahead of November’s pivotal midterms

Elon Musk has become the largest donor to efforts by Republicans to retain control of Congress in November’s pivotal midterm elections, spending more than $275mn on crucial races across the US.

The donations by the world’s richest man — who spent almost $300mn helping Donald Trump get re-elected in 2024 — were made over the past few months, a spokesperson said on Monday, as the Republican Party seeks to shore up several struggling Senate and House campaigns.

As well as donating tens of millions of dollars to his own America PAC, Musk gave $158mn to the Senate Leadership Fund over the summer, the main PAC supporting Republican Senate candidates, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

The enormous sums add to Republicans’ already large financial advantage, with the party’s committees and Trump’s Maga Inc together raising more than $1.1bn, compared with Democrats’ roughly $600mn as of the end of August, according to federal filings. 

Musk’s contributions to Republicans’ midterm efforts — some of which have not yet been formally disclosed in campaign finance records — were first reported by The New York Times. They come at a time when Trump’s record-low polling numbers have cast a shadow over Republicans’ campaigns.

Democrats are broadly expected to flip the House of Representatives in the November 3 election, while the Senate, controlled by Republicans, is viewed as a toss-up.

“If Democrats take control of Washington and win key gubernatorial and attorney-general races this November, then America risks becoming a socialist, woke and borderless country,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for America PAC, echoing one of the Republicans’ central campaign messages.

“These robust investments have allowed the GOP apparatus to get its message out so Republicans can have a fighting chance to defy history.”

Musk’s spending via America PAC has been largely in line with the Trump-linked Maga Inc Super Pac, which has a war chest of more than $400mn.

America PAC has paid for text messages as well as digital and print adverts targeting Senate races in Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Maine and New Hampshire and at least a dozen competitive US House races.

Musk’s enormous donations mark his return to the Maga fold just over a year after he fell out with the US president and threatened to fund a third party to challenge Republicans. 

In June 2025, the trillionaire — who led the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that cut thousands of jobs from the federal workforce — fell out with the president over his landmark tax and spending legisation, which he called an “outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill”.

He suggested Trump was connected to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and swore off further engagement in frontline politics after Tesla sales appeared to suffer from his association with the administration.

But in recent months, Musk has dined at the White House and last week was awarded the National Medal of Science by the president. He has also been chosen to co-lead a review into the modernisation of the Pentagon.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss, whose companies have billions of dollars of contracts with the US government, also has business interests that are under federal review.

Last week, SpaceX announced it was buying licences for wireless spectrum — a move that will need approval from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. Musk’s xAI is also one of the signatories to a White House accord under which leading AI companies agreed to third-party audits of their models.

The world's biggest accountancy firm helped in falsifying documents to hide Roman Abramovich's wealth and evade tax, BBC Panorama has found.

Accounts signed off by Deloitte in Cyprus meant assets such as superyachts, mansions and private jets worth $672m (£508m) vanished from Abramovich's company accounts.

Deloitte also appears to have advised on a scheme to evade a huge tax bill on the oligarch's wealth through the falsification of documents.

Barrister Andrew Mitchell KC, an expert in financial services law, said Panorama's evidence showed the scheme was "straightforward" tax evasion and "it couldn't be more blatant".

Roman Abramovich's lawyers said he denies that he evaded tax or concealed his fortune. They said Panorama provided no evidence he knew about, authorised or directed the falsification of any document and said it was legitimate to rely on advice from professionals.

Deloitte Cyprus said it "acts in compliance with applicable laws".

The findings are being revealed following a joint investigation between BBC Panorama and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

For nearly two decades, Roman Abramovich was the most famous Russian oligarch in the UK, welcomed in London where he bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and bankrolled the club's most successful period. But after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he was sanctioned by the UK government as an associate of President Vladimir Putin and forced to sell the club.

Abramovich has been reported to be living in Turkey, a safe haven for him because it did not apply sanctions. In the Channel Island of Jersey, £5.4bn of his assets remain frozen and a criminal investigation has been going on for four years.

The oligarch's lawyers told the BBC he denies the allegations in the Jersey investigation and says it was "undertaken for political purposes".

Our investigation has uncovered new evidence about the way Abramovich's business empire has been run. It also raises serious questions about the integrity of some of his professional advisers.

The evidence is contained in a leak that includes thousands of documents about the oligarch's finances and the operations of a network of offshore companies administered from Cyprus - which used to be a tax haven popular with Russians - between 1995 and 2022.

The BBC and media partners including the Guardian, Paper Trail Media, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network - as well as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism - have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Cyprus Confidential investigation.

In 2022, Panorama also reported on how Abramovich had made his fortune from a corrupt deal to buy a Russian state-owned oil company in the 1990s, selling it back to the government a decade later for billions in profit. He has previously said allegations of corruption in the deal are false.

The profits from Abramovich's oil deals in Russia were funnelled into a web of offshore companies. They were administered from Cyprus by a corporate services firm called MeritServus, in Limassol, the island's second-largest city.

Until 2005, Deloitte - now the biggest of the "big four" firms which dominate the accounting industry - owned MeritServus. After they split, the two companies worked closely together with Abramovich's associates to manage his global fortune.

The leaked documents from MeritServus reveal some of their practices.

Our first example of backdated paperwork comes in 2006, after a new law in Cyprus meant that company accounts had to be made public. The new transparency law threatened to expose the secrets of Abramovich's vast wealth.

Deloitte Cyprus had prepared draft accounts for 2003 - but had not yet finalised them - for his Cypriot company Amiscan Investments. The accounts detailed $672m of luxury property.

A mansion in West Sussex, a luxury flat in London and an estate in the south of France were all included - plus helicopters, private jets and a small fleet of boats the oligarch owned at the time, including the $147.5m Pelorus.

To keep them secret, Abramovich's associates and Meritservus decided to rewrite history. They drew up a plan to circumvent the transparency law by transferring the assets to Amiscan's parent company in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), where they could be kept hidden. And they backdated the change by three years to make it look like the asset transfer had happened in 2003.

Deloitte Cyprus reviewed the backdated documents and said they were "adequate" to allow them to remove the assets from Amiscan's accounts.

When the 2003 accounts were signed off by Deloitte in 2006, the homes, planes and yachts disappeared at the stroke of a pen. Only $75,000 of assets remained.

Deloitte signed off the accounts even though the leaked documents show it knew they were completely misleading.

Lord Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield, said it was a "violation of a statutory duty" and "pretty scandalous" to misrepresent transaction dates and not to publish true and fair accounts.

Panorama also found evidence that backdated documents had been used in a tax evasion scheme.

This involved another one of Abramovich's Cypriot companies, Kravin Investments, which had almost $2bn in the bank in 2003.

It had been earning large amounts in interest, so Roman Abramovich's company should have been paying tax on that interest to the Cypriot authorities.

But his advisers had another idea to rewrite history.

An email from MeritServus in August 2005 to Abramovich's Russian associates said a plan had been devised after a meeting with Deloitte. "If you agree, it will be necessary to change the financial statements and the accounting records accordingly for 2003 and 2004," the email read.

MeritServus informed the oligarch's Russian associates, that Kravin's "Provisional Tax Assessments for 2005" would be filed showing the company earning no income from the money.

A month later, an associate in Russia emailed in response, "I agree".

MeritServus then created a series of backdated documents which falsely purported to show that Kravin was only holding and investing the funds on behalf of its parent company in the BVI.

This made it look like Kravin did not actually own the money, so it would not be liable for tax in Cyprus.

Deloitte wrote in a September 2005 email that "certain changes will have to be made to the accounts (bank account balances, interest income, profit and loss account)" because of the backdated changes to Kravin's assets.

So Deloitte was apparently advising on the falsification of financial records. The evidence suggests it allowed Abramovich's company to evade millions in tax.

Andrew Mitchell KC told us the scheme was "straightforward" tax evasion. "If it happened in England and it was in the millions, His Majesty's Revenue and Customs would be thinking about a prosecution," he said.

Cypriot MP Christos Christofides said that if tax had been evaded, then "we have to see how we can get our money back and how, if some people are guilty, they have to pay the price according to our law."

In addition to the documents which Deloitte helped to backdate, Abramovich's advisers at MeritServus falsified a third set of records. This involved the oligarch's huge business fortune - more than $10bn - held by a company called Electus Investments in Cyprus.

MeritServus backdated documents to make it look like Electus did not own the fortune.

It used another Abramovich company with exactly the same name of Electus Investments, but this time based in the more secretive BVI, where accounts did not have to be made public.

Emails show that in 2006, MeritServus acknowledged that the fortune was owned by Electus Cyprus. But again it proposed to rewrite the past, this time "to transfer the beneficial ownership to Electus Investments in the BVI" and make it look as though the change had happened three years earlier.

MeritServus signed and backdated documents which falsely purported to show the BVI company had owned the $10bn fortune since 20 November 2003. So when the accounts of the Cypriot company with the same name were made public, it appeared to have assets worth just $145,000.

Roman Abramovich's billions had been made to disappear.

Andrew Mitchell KC told Panorama: "What you take away from it is there are professionals who are prepared to bend and break the rules of their profession and therefore the law. And it looks that they will stop literally at nothing in terms of creating documents."

Vladimir Milov, Russia's deputy minister of energy as Abramovich built his empire and now a critic of the Russian government, said: "For each Russian oligarch or Middle Eastern or African corrupt oligarch, there's an army of Western financial and legal services and PR services providers, who is easily taking money for whitewashing their reputation and making them look normal."

Denying any wrongdoing by the oligarch, Roman Abramovich's lawyers said that he was "not involved in the day-to-day operation of those companies" and that where arrangements were proposed by professional advisers, "reliance on that advice was entirely proper and legitimate".

Deloitte Cyprus said it could not comment on the specific allegations because the documents were more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.

MeritServus closed following the Cyprus Confidential leak.

Privately held Elisity stops cyber attackers and ransomware from spreading across organizations

Quantum-computing company IonQ IONQ 1.12%increase; up pointing triangle struck an all-stock deal to buy Elisity in a transaction that values the cybersecurity firm at up to $1.3 billion, executives told The Wall Street Journal.

It is a bet that cybersecurity will be even more critical for companies as quantum computing and AI systems become more powerful and advanced, said IonQ Chairman and Chief Executive Niccolo de Masi.

“The bad guys are going to keep taking advantage of new technology,” he said in an interview. “Unfortunately, we are entering the most dangerous years, vis-à-vis cybersecurity risks.”

The details

The $1.3 billion deal price includes up to $150 million in extra earnouts subject to Elisity’s future performance. The number of IonQ shares expected to be issued in the transaction will be calculated at a price between $33.07 and $49.61 a share, the executives said.

IonQ shares closed Friday at $39.89, with its market value close to $16 billion. The company’s stock has been on a tear since it went public via a special-purpose acquisition company in 2021.

IonQ’s quantum hardware and software aims to solve problems too difficult for traditional computers across a range of industries, from drug discovery to national defense. It specializes in what’s called trapped-ion quantum computers that have proved to offer greater accuracy.

The business has gotten a boost from the Trump administration’s growing enthusiasm for and backing of quantum-computing technology in the U.S. Over the summer, the president signed executive orders pushing for building a powerful quantum computer and protecting the government against related cyber threats.

Founded in 2019, Elisity offers a platform that aims to prevent cyber attackers or ransomware from spreading across organizations. Some of its big customers include healthcare companies and hospitals.

Elisity Chief Executive James Winebrenner is expected to remain after the deal with IonQ closes. The transaction is set to be announced by the companies later Monday.

The context

De Masi said the two companies together will aim to help customers address various growing cybersecurity risks, including threats that involve so-called AI agents.

A series of rogue AI hacks in recent months has rattled the industry and government officials. In one instance, a swarm of OpenAI agents accessed U.S. government websites over several months. Anthropic’s Mythos model has also set off alarm bells on Wall Street.

De Masi said American corporations and the U.S. government must be prepared ahead of “Q-Day”—a looming point in time when quantum computers will be powerful enough to crack today’s widely used public-key cryptography.

IonQ, which works closely with the U.S. Defense Department, has been on an acquisition spree to become a one-stop shop for its customers. Earlier this year, it struck its biggest deal yet, a $1.8 billion takeover of chip maker SkyWater Technology.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, was only six years old in 1990, the year the Human Genome Project got launched.

That project, a multibillion-dollar international effort led by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, resulted in the announcement 10 years later of an awe-inspiring milestone: the first sequencing of the human genetic code—the building blocks of life. When President Bill Clinton described the achievement in 2000, he framed it in grand terms: “We are learning the language in which God created life.”

So it was intriguing to hear another scientific collaboration compared to that earlier achievement at a reception this week hosted by Biohub, the primary philanthropic effort of Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The event this week is one of a number of recent moments that herald a changing of the scientific guard from major universities to big tech companies.

Speaking at the Treehouse Hotel in Sunnyvale, Calif., Zuckerberg told the gathering of around 100 tech executives, scientists and academics that he and Chan had started the first version of what is now called Biohub almost 10 years ago to the day with the goal of trying to cure and prevent all diseases by the end of the century. “We got a lot of eye rolls,” Zuckerberg said. “People thought that was kind of crazy.” Thanks to AI and other advances in technology, he added, “That no longer seems quite so crazy.”

He then turned to Lori Goler, president of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who announced that Biohub is partnering with the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy in a $1.8 billion investment to create new technologies and build the scientific infrastructure required to drive “AI-powered biology.”

Biohub, which launched what it calls the “Virtual Biology Initiative” in April with a $500 million commitment, also said at the event that Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, a company spun off of DeepMind, have agreed to kick in $300 million.

“We were inspired by the Human Genome Project,” Goler told the group. Goler added that they hope the initiative “will have the same level of impact and will be as important as the Human Genome Project has been.” (Anyone going to The Information’s WTF Summit later this month will hear more from Goler on the future of AI biology.)

Despite the evening’s focus on collaboration, science can be an isolating discipline in its daily practice. When I visit labs, I am always amazed by how quiet they are. The scientists are usually intently concentrating on not making a false step that could lead to the contamination of an experiment. And yet, once the results leave the lab and reach the public, clamor often ensues. Controversial findings spark debate over ethical and moral questions. Transformative discoveries are celebrated with an element of pageantry and recognition. Both are reminders of our common humanity—and that the ultimate goal of science is to make all our lives better. This leads to invitations to the White House like the one that happened back in 2000 with the scientists at the helm of the Human Genome Project. Or even more personal celebratory videos like the ones posted on social media all this week by happy scientists who received early morning calls from Sweden learning they had won Nobel Prizes. (How can you not be moved by this video of the Stanford neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth telling his kids he won the Nobel Prize for medicine?)

Zuckerberg is one of the most prominent symbols of how AI is altering the scientific landscape and bringing new leaders into an arena once dominated by major universities. He was appointed by President Trump in March to be a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is joined there by other high-profile Silicon Valley names, including Google’s Sergey Brin, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. Of the 13 people now on the council, only one is an academic researcher.

Two other signs this week reflect the change. On Oct. 8, Brin and Huang, alongside other tech notables, received the National Medals of Science from President Trump. The same day, Anthropic said it is expanding its own partnership with the government. It will provide $150 million worth of AI credits and other support for the Genesis Mission launched by Trump last year to use AI to accelerate scientific discoveries.

A Biohub team traveled to Washington in July to attend the first Genesis Mission Summit. Plans for the newly announced partnership with the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy grew out of that visit. So perhaps it’s only fair that the government made its own pilgrimage out to Silicon Valley. Appearing on stage together is another way of showing a shared faith that Silicon Valley and AI are the favored engines these days to try to unlock insights into the mysteries of our cells and what goes wrong when we get sick.

I talked briefly with Goler the day after the reception. She said Biohub plans to host an annual AI and bio event. Biohub will likely find more guests eager to attend, from the private sector and the government. “It really is a cultural moment,” she said.