Odd Lots Sep 19, 2026 33m 13m saved
With Gene Sykes, Co-Head of Global M&A at Goldman Sachs, Chair of the Board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee
Goldman Sachs counted the companies that have told investors their use of artificial intelligence is already showing up in earnings per share. It got to 2%.
The common view is that the current deal boom is private equity clearing its backlog. Gene Sykes said the opposite is happening: the share of the merger market made up of private-equity-owned companies being sold has fallen this year, and what replaced it is corporate buyers reacting to technology.
"Well, on the one hand, this is the biggest M&A year in the history of the world."
Gene Sykes, co-head of global M&A at Goldman Sachs, on Odd Lots, has been a partner at the firm for what he says is half his life. He ran the bid that brought the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games to Los Angeles, chairs the board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and joined the International Olympic Committee about two and a half years ago.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 33 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 16 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
The merger market is running at a record, and private equity is a smaller part of it than usual
Sykes dates the last peak to 2021 and says this year is bigger
Los Angeles is building nothing for 2028 — the athletes go into UCLA dormitories and the events go into stadiums that already exist
Only 2% of companies have told investors that AI improved their earnings per share
He puts the share that have implemented an AI strategy at 20 to 30%
NBC has bought US Olympic rights through 2036, before anyone knows where the 2036 Games will be
80% of startups are built to be sold, and he says the 20% that stay independent are the ones with something nobody else has
The AI build-out is being paid for by cash-rich platforms, not venture capital — which he calls the difference from 2000
Half the tickets for 2028 have already been sold, and the next release is next year
There is no advertising on an Olympic field of play, which he says is a rule everyone abides by
Deal appetite is high now and he does not expect it to last — financing windows close and regulators change
1. Three Olympic Jobs
Asked to explain who he is, Sykes described a career split between Goldman Sachs and the Olympic movement. At the bank he works on technology and media, healthcare and other sectors, advises clients who want advice, and spends a lot of his time mentoring.
He has been a Goldman Sachs partner for half his life
I'm still a Goldman Sachs partner after many, many years. I think I've been a partner at Goldman Sachs for half my life.
Gene Sykes
The other half of his time, or more, goes to the Olympics. He led the Los Angeles bid, which was originally for the 2024 Games and was awarded the 2028 Games. Four years ago he became chair of the board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and about two and a half years ago a member of the International Olympic Committee.
His committee job is building the American team, not the event
So I spent a lot more time now thinking about how do we create Team USA so that our athletes are always the highest performing athletes in any of these Olympic or Paralympic events.
Gene Sykes
2. Bigger Than the World Cup
One host, who said she is not a sports fan, asked what a successful Games actually looks like — keeping costs down, or something less measurable. Sykes answered on the experience rather than the budget.
The test is whether people say they could not have seen it anywhere else
Successful Olympic Games has to be a games that everyone says, I'll never forget this. This is an incredible experience. And I only saw it here.
Gene Sykes
He pushed back on the idea that the audience is a sports audience at all, naming figure skater Alyssa Liu as the kind of draw that brings in people who would not call themselves fans.
The Olympic audience skews female
The other thing about the Olympics most people don't realize is the Olympics are the one sports experience that skews toward women more than toward men.
Gene Sykes
Asked for a sense of the scale, Sykes used the World Cup the US had just hosted with Mexico and Canada as the comparison.
He put the combined Games far above the World Cup on every count
By comparison, in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, when you put the two together, we'll have 17,000 athletes. We'll have something like 900 separate events, medal events. It's enormous. We'll sell 15 million tickets between the Olympic and the Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. The World Cup sold 6.5 million tickets.
Gene Sykes
His own summary of the range of sports involved
You know, it's not everything, but it's maybe 90% of everything you can imagine in the world of sports.
Gene Sykes
3. A Privately Funded Games
A host said she keeps seeing the 2028 Games described as the first privately funded Olympics and was not sure that claim held up. Sykes largely agreed with the qualification.
No government money runs the Games, except for security
Well, it's essentially privately funded in that there's no government support to put the games on, with the exception of the federal government playing a role in security and security-related logistics, things of that sort.
Gene Sykes
He said 206 countries will send teams, which is what makes federal involvement in security unavoidable. The reason the private model works in Los Angeles is that the venues are already standing.
Nothing has to be built, including the athletes' village
We have more stadia and arenas and world-class places where sports already takes place. So we don't have to build anything. We're not building a village for the athletes, which is what Paris had to do because we've got such great residences at UCLA.
Gene Sykes
UCLA houses more students in an ordinary year than the Games will need to house athletes, he said, which is why the plan is to put all of them there.
4. Traffic, Lines, One App
A host said his objection to attending is traffic and queuing, and asked to be sold on the idea. Sykes reached for the last time the city hosted.
The 1984 traffic predictions did not come true
To give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the 84 games. We hosted the games in 1984. A lot of people said, I'm going to leave because the traffic is going to be so bad. And the traffic was totally manageable.
Gene Sykes
His explanation is behavioral rather than structural: drivers avoid roads when they are told in advance to avoid them.
Warning people in advance is what clears the roads
The thing about LA and traffic is if you tell people in advance something is happening, stay off the roads, and they all know about it.
Gene Sykes
On top of that, the high-occupancy vehicle lanes that exist today will be turned into Olympic lanes for the event. Asked whether attending means downloading several apps, he said one.
Half the tickets are already gone and the next release is next year
Literally half the tickets have already been sold. So you want to register for the tickets. The next time the tickets are available is next year.
Gene Sykes
He does not expect long lines, because the venues run events already
And I don't think you'll have many lines. I think the venues actually will be really great.
Gene Sykes
5. What the World Cup Taught
Asked what he would have done differently at the World Cup, Sykes named one incident: the call made to the president over a red card.
His one criticism of the World Cup was a phone call
Certainly, I would have been careful about calling the president for a red card violation. That probably wasn't the best thing for the World Cup's image.
Gene Sykes
Everything else he rated a success. Americans got to watch the best players in a sport that is not the country's own, and he thinks the exposure changed how the sport is viewed at home.
He says the tournament moved American opinion of soccer
I think it actually really transformed Americans' view of that sport, and they'll appreciate that sport differently than they ever have before.
Gene Sykes
He also separated how visitors experienced the country from how its politics are perceived abroad.
Visitors left with a better impression of the US than its politics get
And the image that we Americans made of ourselves to the rest of the world was incredibly positive and constructive, even when the public image of American politicians may be very mixed.
Gene Sykes
6. Tickets Priced at Market
A host listed the pattern of pre-event panic stories: unfinished stadiums, grass that will not grow, international visitors staying away. He asked whether the current environment in the US would hold attendance down. Sykes said no, and pointed to what has already sold.
Everything offered so far has sold
The ticket sales, first of all, have been incredibly positive. As soon as they were offered, everything was sold.
Gene Sykes
He accepted that prices are high and declined to apologize for it, on the grounds that the ticket revenue is what pays for the event.
Ticket revenue is the funding, so the prices are set at the market
And it's going to take a lot of ticket sales to actually pay for these games. So I don't really apologize for the fact that they're high priced
Gene Sykes
A host interjected that she had not called the tickets expensive and has no view on what a fair price for a sports ticket is.
7. NBC Locked In to 2036
Asked about the revenue mix, Sykes explained that the largest piece is sold long before the host city does anything. The International Olympic Committee sells media rights for all the Games, years ahead.
NBC's US rights run past two Games nobody has chosen yet
NBC is the media rights holder for the United States. They've got a deal that now goes through 2036. We don't even know where the games are going to be in 2036.
Gene Sykes
What US rights cost per Games
It's a billion and a half dollars or more per games to have the rights in the United States.
Gene Sykes
The IOC sells global sponsorships on top of that, and he named Coca-Cola, Visa and Samsung. The local organizing committee then sells its own.
The Los Angeles organizers have sold their own sponsorships
And so they've sold rights to Starbucks and Uber and Google.
Gene Sykes
Why he thinks corporate demand is there
They want to be part of it because they know this is going to be the biggest event in the history of the world.
Gene Sykes
8. No Ads on the Field
A host raised the criticism aimed at FIFA: commercial breaks engineered into matches, such as water breaks that create advertising slots. She asked whether the Olympics will add sponsorship inventory of that kind. Sykes ruled it out.
Olympic rules keep advertising off the field of play
So the Olympics are famous for having clean venues. If you've been in Olympic games and you see the field of play, you'll notice there's no corporate advertising anywhere in the field of play.
Gene Sykes
Where a brand does appear, he said, it is offstage — the area where an athlete puts on a helmet, rather than anywhere the competition happens.
9. The Biggest M&A Year
A host described the strange condition in which the incumbents in AI are private companies and the public companies do not behave like incumbents, and asked what that does to dealmaking. Sykes started with the size of the market.
This year is running above the 2021 peak
Biggest year by far. We expect the M&A market to be much bigger than it was at the peak. The last peak was 2021, inflated by COVID.
Gene Sykes
The composition has changed as well. He gave the share of the market accounted for by sales of private-equity-owned companies, then the figure for this year.
Sponsor sales have fallen as a share of the market
And for the past several years, 40% of the M&A market has been selling companies that were owned by private equity sponsors. 40%. This year, that's 30%.
Gene Sykes
What has replaced it, on his account, is corporate demand created by technology — natural resources and power generation companies building infrastructure for AI, and a boom in semiconductor deals as buyers try to own chip technology outright.
One phenomenon is driving the deal market and everything else
So what's driving the M&A market is the same phenomenon that we see driving interest in almost everything. And it's actually incredibly strong.
Gene Sykes
10. Most Startups Get Sold
A host said big incumbents struggle to build AI into an existing organization while startups can begin from scratch, and asked whether a company can buy its way to AI competence. Sykes answered from the seller's side.
Four in five startups are built to be sold
Well, every startup, even in AI, has to think to themselves, what's the endgame? And for 80% of the startups, the endgame is selling themselves to somebody else.
Gene Sykes
That, he said, is the economic payoff the founder and the venture investors are working toward, and it means the question every founder has to answer is how their product completes somebody else's. The 20% that stay independent have something genuinely different — and without it, he added, nobody would want to buy them either.
SpaceX is his example of differentiation through defiance
And you think about SpaceX. SpaceX did something different, and they did something different in a market where there were lots of incumbents, but the incumbents played in a regulatory environment that SpaceX decided to defy.
Gene Sykes
Two AI companies have passed the point of being acquirable
I think we'll see, obviously, Anthropic and OpenAI be independent companies. They're almost too big for anybody to buy.
Gene Sykes
His caveat was that size alone does not settle it: a buyer, or a public market, still has to believe the platform is durable.
11. The Dot-Com Parallel
A host laid out the comparison with the telecom build-out of the late 1990s: too much cable laid, eventually all used, and a bubble in the meantime. He asked whether the same thing is happening. Sykes did not claim to know.
He will not say whether the infrastructure being built is too much
Well, certainly there's no way to know for sure how big is this market going to be? And are we committing to build too much infrastructure relative to the real demand that we're going to see five or six years from now? I think the answer is we just don't know.
Gene Sykes
The difference he does point to is who is writing the checks. The first internet build-out was financed by venture capitalists. This one is financed by the companies with the largest cash flows in the world.
The financiers this time are the platforms themselves
Now the investors in this build out are the most successful big technology platforms anywhere in the world who had hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow until this year. So it's an incredible turnabout.
Gene Sykes
12. AI Adoption at 2%
A host argued that real enterprise AI adoption is close to zero, and that buying every employee a chat subscription is a glorified search tool rather than AI in a workflow. Sykes had a number for it.
Gene Sykes on AI adoption: the measured figure is 2%
Well, no, we just did an analysis and we said it's 2% today.
Gene Sykes
He then defined what the 2% counts, and gave a much larger figure for companies that are doing the work but have not yet reported a result.
Reported earnings impact is 2%; implementation is 20 to 30%
So 2% are the companies who in their earnings reports have said, we see an impact on EPS, a positive impact of our use of AI, 2% so far. There are probably 20 or 30% of the companies that have actually implemented strategies to use AI in everything they do.
Gene Sykes
He used his own firm as the example, saying Goldman Sachs runs large numbers of prompts and that the change is being driven from the bottom of the organization.
The youngest people at the bank are the ones implementing it
And all of the people who are the youngest people at Goldman Sachs are native AI people working to implement things that we didn't think about a year ago.
Gene Sykes
The result he described is capacity: people get more done faster, and are pushed toward different problems than they were a year ago.
13. AI in the Deal Business
A host put it to him that junior analysts are already using AI for slides and spreadsheets and perhaps for target screening, but that M&A is ultimately a relationship business, and asked what real use would look like. Sykes described the skill the job actually requires.
The job is synthesizing many variables at once
I think M&A is a business of using trusted relationships and good advice. People are looking for someone who understands the world and is able to synthesize a lot of independent variables.
Gene Sykes
His claim is that the tool raises the ceiling for people who already have that ability — faster conclusions, and a habit of testing the first answer by asking the opposite question.
The gain is confidence and judgment, not intelligence
And so I think people become — it's not that they're becoming smarter, it's if they have access to more information, better information, and that allows them to have more confidence and better judgment.
Gene Sykes
He expects that to change how everyone in the advisory business works and what clients come to expect from them.
14. Media's Two Futures
A host laid out two readings of what AI does to media: everyone can make video, so media is commoditized; or owning intellectual property becomes a multiplier, with an actor licensing several versions of himself. Sykes said the answer depends on the client.
Which future a client sees depends on their own confidence
Depends on how self-confident the client is.
Gene Sykes
Music incumbents are the anxious case
I would say if you look at incumbents in the music industry, they're very anxious about AI upending something that's been seasoned and built over a long period of time.
Gene Sykes
Their question, he said, is how to stop content they own or license being misused, and he thinks that has to be settled. The creator's position is the opposite one.
For a creator the tool removes a competence limit
At the same time, if you are the creator and you think, well, I just have a tool that makes my creativity that much more potent, and I'm going to do something I only imagined about doing, but I could never figure out how to do it myself.
Gene Sykes
Asked whether back catalogs are getting more or less valuable, he said more, and gave two reasons: buyers have spent the past decade securitizing the cash flows from them, and familiar work holds its appeal.
He expects AI to find new uses for old content
And I think AI is likely to make existing contents in catalogs more valuable because it will find more uses for existing content.
Gene Sykes
His example of an algorithm that already works this way was TikTok, which he credited to the engineer who designed it in China a decade ago and the teams built around him.
The one Chinese product he says the rest of the world wanted to buy
He is, by the way, the one person who would say he is the only Chinese person or only Chinese company to have created something that the rest of the world really wants to buy because it's totally unique and it was developed there.
Gene Sykes
Asked whether a startup in Los Angeles would offer to clone a podcast host's voice to produce ten times the output, he said yes.
Voice cloning pitches are already being made
I believe it is. I believe you'll find lots of people encouraging you to try things that are out of your comfort zone, but have great upside potential.
Gene Sykes
15. Appetite, Not a Frenzy
Asked what he sees at the top of a cycle, after four decades of deals, Sykes drew a distinction between enthusiasm and mania.
He calls the current market an appetite rather than a frenzy
I think there's not a frenzy, but an appetite for deals right now on the part of people who think about changing what they have or making it better by doing a deal that they didn't imagine they would be able to get done five years ago.
Gene Sykes
The thing he warns about is not a crash but a closing window: financing markets tighten, and regulators become less permissive.
Boards are pro-deal now, and he does not expect that to hold
So I actually think the bias on the part of corporate boards and decision makers is to be pro-deal in a way that we see from time to time. But I don't think we see it as something that lasts forever. You have to take advantage of it when it's there.
Gene Sykes
16. No M Left in M&A
A host relayed a line from a friend who does M&A professionally: there are no mergers any more, only acquisitions, and the last real merger was Citigroup and Travelers. Sykes said the distinction never meant much.
Every merger had an acquirer
Wait, but this was always true. Whenever there was a merger, someone would always be acquiring someone else.
Gene Sykes
The M is a description of relative size
Look, M is just a way of describing you're putting two companies together that generally are in the same size category.
Gene Sykes
Split boards and split management teams exist to get the deal agreed, he said — they give people room to say the transaction is a sensible one and that shareholders were paid a premium. They do not survive.
Control concentrates within a year of closing
But a year after the deal is done, you have to get used to the world that you have, and leadership and the influence to make decisions for the company tends to consolidate into a set of hands that may not be exactly where you started.
Gene Sykes
Bonus Insights
Risk factors are the part of a filing he says would stop anyone investing
Asked whether a future AI filing will list human extinction among its risk factors, Sykes said lawyers will push for full disclosure.
I think the lawyers will probably say you better protect yourself and make sure that the disclosure is complete.
Gene Sykes
I've always thought if people only read the S1s, they would never invest in another company because they're always so frightening.
Gene Sykes
Both hosts said they turn to the risk factors first when they read a filing. Sykes called that the journalist's prerogative.
The interview was recorded on stage in Huntington Beach
The episode was taped live at the Future Proof Festival, the fourth year the show has attended. The hosts opened with a run of banter about Southern California — one of them said the conference brings heaven on earth, and the other wondered aloud why the settlers heading west stopped in Nebraska when California was further along the same road.
One host has a standing offer of a house in Los Angeles for the Games
She said friends who own a house there are considering renting it out for the Olympics but would give it up for her co-host instead. Sykes used it as a closing argument: accommodation is solved, so he should go.
Neither host committed to attending
Afterward, one said she still thinks it sounds like a mess but found the pitch compelling, and that she might buy cheap tickets for kayaking or table tennis rather than track and field. The other said he would watch on television.
Sykes's bottom line is that the same force is behind both halves of his working life: corporate buyers are paying record prices to acquire technology they cannot build fast enough, and corporate sponsors are paying for an event that will not be repeated — and in both cases, he said, the window to act is open now rather than permanently.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Goldman Sachs (Where he has been a partner for what he says is half his life, working on technology and media, healthcare and other sectors; he says its youngest employees are driving its AI implementation)
LA28 (The 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games he bid for — originally for 2024 — which he says need no new construction)
International Olympic Committee (Sells media rights and global sponsorships years in advance; he became a member about two and a half years ago)
U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (He became chair of the board four years ago; the job he describes is making Team USA's athletes the highest performing in each event)
FIFA World Cup 26 (His comparison throughout, and the event he says changed how Americans view soccer, spoiled only by a phone call to the president over a red card)
UCLA (Its residences replace the athletes' village Paris had to build; he says it houses more students in a normal year than the Games will need to house athletes)
NBC (Holds US Olympic media rights through 2036, before the 2036 host is known, at what he says is "a billion and a half dollars or more per games")
Coca-Cola, Visa and Samsung (The IOC-level sponsors he named as the brands seen at every Games)
Starbucks, Uber and Google (Sponsorships sold by the Los Angeles organizers themselves, on top of the global deals)
SpaceX (His example of a company that stayed independent by defying the regulatory environment its incumbents worked within)
Anthropic and OpenAI (He expects both to remain independent because they are "almost too big for anybody to buy")
ChatGPT and Claude (Raised by a host as the subscriptions companies hand out, which he called a glorified search rather than adoption)
TikTok (His example of an algorithm built in China that the rest of the world wanted; he used it as a precursor to how AI will shape what content people are shown)
Future Proof Festival (The Huntington Beach conference where the conversation was recorded live on stage)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Goldman Sachs M&A Outlook (A host said he had been reading it on the beach, and used its section on deals done to acquire AI capability as the basis for his question)
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