Workday skyrockets 20% before trading halted on report of Silver Lake takeover

BREAKING: $WDAY jumps 20% before trading halted on a report that Silver Lake is in talks to take Workday private.

Workday just jumped twenty percent so fast they had to halt the stock.

The trigger was a report that Silver Lake, the private equity giant, is in talks to take the HR software maker private. The market value last sat above fifty three billion dollars, so this would be one of the biggest take-privates in tech history. You can see the company's Pleasanton headquarters here, home of the software half of corporate America uses to request vacation days.

Why now? Software has been getting hammered on fears that AI eats these business models alive. Co-founder Aneel Bhusri took back the CEO chair in March, and analysts point out he and Silver Lake's Egon Durban go way back. When a founder returns and an old friend with a giant checkbook comes calling, that's rarely a coincidence.

Neither company is commenting yet. But a fifty three billion dollar company just became a takeover target in an afternoon, and everyone holding beaten-down software stocks felt that.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.

Source Read the original reporting at cnbc.com