NEW YORK (AP) — The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday.
Bending Spoons priced 58 million shares at $29 apiece. The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 41% shortly after it started trading under the symbol “BSP” on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $25.5 billion.
Among the company's well-known holdings are the event creation and ticketing company Eventbrite, and the video hosting service Vimeo. AOL, formerly America Online, is a more recent acquisition for the company. The email and search engine service dates back to the dawn of the internet age.
AOL itself went public in 1992 and was a vanguard of technology and communication. It reached a market value of $164 billion in 2000 shortly before merging with Time Warner. It then crashed along with the rest of the industry following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It has been bought and sold several times over the last two decades.
Bending Spoons' key focus is acquiring troubled tech companies and overhauling them. The company takes its name from the fictional concept of bending spoons with the mind, as portrayed in the dystopian AI-focused “The Matrix” films. The company's founders say the name is meant to evoke focus and dedication, as well as some humor.
“We were about to attempt to create a world-class company with $40,000, a team of five, and a track record that read 0 for 1," the company wrote in its prospectus. “A touch of irony seemed appropriate.”
The Italy-based company was founded by three friends in 2013 following the failure of their first attempt at building a technology startup. It has since grown by buying more than 50 companies.
The acquired companies are reorganized, and AI technology is often a key tool in the redesign. The focus remains on subscription-based revenue from the portfolio of businesses.
The company said it had net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million during the first three months of 2026. It had more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million monthly paying customers as of March.
The company has debt of just under $4.4 billion. It plans to use proceeds from the offering to invest in new acquisitions.
The Bending Spoons offering comes amid a resurgence in the IPO market this year, highlighted by the record-setting market debut of SpaceX last month.
FILE - AOL's home page is shown on a computer screen, Aug. 4, 2006, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll asked a judge Tuesday to require President Donald Trump to pay her $5 million from a jury verdict that concluded Trump sexually abused her in 1996 and defamed her after she publicly described the attack in 2019.
Carroll's lawyers said in papers filed in Manhattan federal court that Trump is unjustly trying to delay releasing the money from an escrow fund after the Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal of the 2023 civil verdict.
The amount has grown to nearly $5.8 million with interest and should be required by the court to be disbursed, the lawyers wrote, saying Trump has resumed his defamatory attacks against Carroll as his lawyers consider asking the high court to reconsider its decision.
On Wednesday, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan agreed to let Carroll's request for the payout to be addressed on an expedited basis, with a response from Trump's lawyers due by July 7.
The jury reached its verdict in a trial that Trump did not attend after Carroll testified that she was sexually abused by Trump in spring 1996 in the dressing room of a midtown Manhattan luxury department store after a flirtatious and friendly chance encounter between them turned violent.
Carroll, 82, first talked about the attack publicly in 2019 in a memoir while Trump was president. He repeatedly insisted that he never knew Carroll. He also accused her of trying to sell books at his expense and having political motives.
Trump promised on social media Monday to keep fighting what he called a “Weaponization and Lawfare Case” after the Supreme Court's rejection became known.
Carroll's court filing said lawyers for Trump contacted her attorneys minutes after Trump published a response to the high court's action, asking that the payout be delayed while the Supreme Court is asked to reconsider its decision.
But Carroll's lawyers — Roberta Kaplan, D. Brandon Trice and Maximilian T. Crema — said in their court filing that there was no reason to delay the payment, especially since the Supreme Court expressed no disagreement in deciding not to hear the case.
“To date, Carroll has agreed to each of Defendant’s many requests to delay the payment he owes her. Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today. It is time for him to pay Carroll,” they wrote.
Lawyers for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump is also appealing $83 million in defamation compensation granted to Carroll by a separate Manhattan jury after a January 2024 trial at which Trump briefly testified.
At that trial, Judge Kaplan, who is unrelated to Carroll's attorney, required that jury to accept the findings of the previous jury and only determine how much money, if any, Trump owed Carroll for comments he made about her as president.
FILE - The U.S. Supreme Court is seen, June 11, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)
FILE - E. Jean Carroll arrives at Manhattan federal court, Jan. 17, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)
