View / We’re in the ‘call me, maybe’ era of M&A

Deal talks used to be closely held secrets, discussed in backrooms of steakhouses or during late Sunday night board calls. No longer. We’re now in the “call me, maybe” era of dealmaking.

See United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby publicly making the case Monday for buying American Airlines. Or Charter’s cry for bigger deals on its earnings call last week (tell me you want Comcast to buy you without telling me you want Comcast to buy you).

And, of course, the largest deal of 2025 — the $85 billion Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern tie-up — started out as a rhetorical question floated out loud at a Wells Fargo investor conference: “Do I, Jim Vena, think that a merger would be beneficial for the country? Absolutely,” the Union Pacific CEO said to a roomful of media and investors in a monologue that kicked off a game of M&A musical chairs — and that ended in the industry’s largest-ever deal.

CEOs are following the nation’s dealmaker-in-chief in saying the quiet part out loud. President Donald Trump negotiates in public, floating trial balloons on everything from tariffs to privatizing the post office to launching a sovereign wealth fund, turning what in other White Houses was a tightly orchestrated policy process into a national ideas dinner.

Plus, the sheer volume of all those half-baked proclamations has meant the half-life of a negative or embarrassing one — like the public rejection American Airlines CEO Robert Isom handed Kirby — is shorter than ever before.

Goldman Sachs President John Waldron has called this a moment of “endgame consolidation,” where previously untenable deals have a greater chance of being pushed through with little hand-wringing. CEOs like Charter’s Chris Winfrey have no problem trying their luck.

“We’d like to acquire more cable assets if it can be done at an appropriate price,” Winfrey said on his earnings call Friday, in what analysts described as a thinly veiled overture to Comcast, the $183 billion juggernaut and chief cable rival.

Chatter has been rising for months that the two biggest cable players would, or were planning to, explore a deal. But when I put it to one longtime Comcast adviser weeks ago, they laughed me off the phone. Comcast considers it to be a risible suggestion, with no deal talks underway, according to people familiar with the matter.

The same goes for United’s Scott Kirby. Weeks before reports that United was considering a deal with American (which rebuffed the idea) Kirby paid a visit to the White House and pitched the merits of the airline merger to Trump himself — an idea the president was said to be receptive to, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

Kirby, undaunted, responded with a public statement Monday. “I approached American about exploring a combination because I thought we could do something incredible for customers together,” he wrote in a 1,100-word statement laying out the merits of the merger. Far from being humbled, Kirby doubled down publicly.

But no matter how ludicrous or unlikely a deal may seem, CEOs feel emboldened to say whatever they want to get negotiations going. (“Our ask… is to simply work together,” US Foods CEO said in the midst of its hostile bid for a rival company last summer.)

Who can blame them? They’ve watched Trump’s antitrust enforcers wave through previously unimaginable combinations. They’ve learned that the president’s approval is often enough to win over investors — and drive stock prices higher. And they’ve privately fretted that if they don’t move now, they’ll be left in the dust — especially as AI comes to eat up large swaths of their businesses.

Liz Hoffman contributed to this report.