Legends & Lessons

The 2026 Business Year: The Deals, Layoffs and Sectors That Defined It

The 2026 business year has been defined by concentration: the biggest deals got bigger, AI became the standard reason companies cite for cutting staff, and a handful of sectors, tech, media, energy and autos, absorbed most of the disruption. It started with tariffs, moved through the largest private acquisition in history, and has left the media industry and the EV market looking nothing like they did at the start of the year.

Here’s what happened, organized by the sectors that felt it most.

Technology & AI: the sector setting the pace

SpaceX acquired xAI for $250 billion in an all-stock deal announced February 2, 2026, folding Elon Musk’s AI company, including Grok and the X platform, into SpaceX. The combined entity was valued around $1.25 trillion, with SpaceX itself pegged at roughly $1 trillion. It’s the largest acquisition of a privately held company on record, and it doubled as a cash lifeline for xAI, which had been burning through capital fast. SpaceX has since been eyeing an IPO that could rank among the largest ever.

Hyperscaler capital spending (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) is on pace to exceed $350 billion for the year, almost entirely on data centers, custom chips and power. That spending pulled AI M&A activity with it: over 260 AI-related deals closed in Q1 alone, up sharply year over year, with acquirers mostly buying young, specific-capability startups rather than waiting for them to scale into competitors.

Media & Entertainment: the industry that got rebuilt

Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery was the year’s biggest media story. After outbidding Netflix, Paramount agreed to pay $31 per share in cash, an $81 billion equity value and roughly $110 to $111 billion enterprise value, in a deal announced February 27 and approved by WBD shareholders on April 23. It’s expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory clearance, and combines HBO, CNN, CBS and Paramount+ into a single company built to compete with Netflix and Disney at scale.

Energy & Utilities: chasing AI’s power demand

AI’s appetite for electricity turned power companies into the year’s hottest acquisition targets.

BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, with EQT, agreed to buy AES Corporation for $15 per share, an enterprise value of about $33.4 billion, one of the largest utility buyouts in US history, driven squarely by data-center demand.
Devon Energy and Coterra Energy merged (closed May 2026) to create a multi-basin shale major, positioning to negotiate supply deals with power-hungry hyperscalers.

Real Estate: apartments go big

Equity Residential and AvalonBay combined in an all-stock merger covering roughly 180,000 rental units and a combined equity value near $52 billion, the largest REIT merger in modern history, a bet that the US housing supply deficit will keep apartment demand strong even with rates elevated.

The Layoffs: AI as the stated reason

As of September 24, trackers put 2026 layoffs at 519 events affecting 225,122 workers, roughly 843 job losses a day. Oracle’s cut of up to 30,000 was the single largest. A large and growing share of 2026 layoff announcements (trackers differ on the exact percentage, but it’s a plurality to majority depending on the source and month) explicitly cite AI, automation, or machine learning.

Named cuts through the year: Microsoft (4,800), Amazon (roughly 14,000 to 16,000 corporate roles), Meta (1,500 from Reality Labs in January), GitLab (14% of staff in June, explicitly to fund AI infrastructure), Volkswagen (50,000 planned over two years), and Uber (about 3,400, 10% of its global workforce, in September). The functions hit hardest: programmers, customer service, data entry, content writing and marketing, the roles where AI capability currently overlaps most with paid human work.

Automotive: EVs lose their shine

Jaguar Land Rover announced plans to cut up to 4,000 jobs over two years. Volkswagen’s 50,000-job restructuring reflects falling China and North America sales layered on top of tariff costs. Meanwhile the EV resale market kept deteriorating: a 2026 iSeeCars study put average five-year EV depreciation at 57.2%, against 41.8% for vehicles overall, with the Nissan Leaf down 63.1%. Consumers have leaned back toward hybrids as the pragmatic middle ground.

Trade & Macro: the backdrop to everything

Tariff policy shaped cost structures across manufacturing, retail, autos and semiconductors all year. Canada’s retaliatory duties on roughly $20 billion of US goods, effective September 2026, mark the first formal G7 retaliation of this trade cycle, with Trump responding by threatening Bombardier’s US market access unless it moves production stateside. The 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since November 2023 as tariff-driven costs and rate pressure squeezed manufacturers and retailers simultaneously.

What’s Still Unresolved

Three threads carry the biggest uncertainty for the rest of the 2026 business year: whether the Paramount-WBD deal clears regulators before its debt load becomes a management problem; how far the US-Canada tariff standoff escalates from here; and whether the AI layoff wave, up sharply from 2025’s pace, keeps accelerating as 2025’s infrastructure spending starts showing up as headcount reductions instead of new hires.

Above all, the 2026 business year’s story has been concentration: the biggest deals got bigger, AI became the standard reason companies give for cutting staff, and the sectors hit hardest by AI and tariffs together (tech, media, energy, autos) still haven’t found stable ground. piece of software meant for drawing houses, and a story about a mother and her child that turned out to be more true than anyone making it could have planned.