Vincent Bolloré rejects Ackman’s $64bn Universal Music bid

Vincent Bolloré has formally turned down Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square offer for Universal Music Group, ending the largest take-private attempt in music-industry history.

Vincent Bolloré has formally rejected Bill Ackman’s $64bn offer for Universal Music Group, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday, ending Pershing Square’s seven-week campaign to take the world’s largest recorded-music company private.

The rejection, conveyed through Bolloré’s holding structure rather than UMG’s own board, was the outcome that almost every credible analyst had forecast since the offer landed in April.

The arithmetic always pointed here. Bolloré controls roughly 28% of UMG through his Vivendi stake. Ackman’s offer would have valued the company at a premium to its Amsterdam listing but at, on Bolloré’s own published estimates, a meaningful discount to the asset’s fair value.

JPMorgan’s analysts laid out the rejection logic in early April: Bolloré does not need cash, has spent years buying UMG shares rather than selling them, has historically favoured a European listing and domicile, and would not voluntarily reduce his influence over a company he treats as a strategic anchor.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

As Ackman himself acknowledged publicly earlier this month, “without Bolloré, we don’t have a transaction.”

The substantive question Ackman raised remains. His public case has been that UMG “really needs a reset”, with the company’s share price underperforming the wider music-industry cycle despite its dominant catalogue position and exposure to subscription-streaming growth.

Pershing Square’s thesis was that a private structure, with new operating discipline and a more aggressive AI-licensing posture, could close that gap. Spotify trades at a multiple of its earnings; UMG trades at a meaningful discount.

The valuation gap exists, and Ackman’s argument is that the gap is structural rather than cyclical. Bolloré’s rejection accepts the gap as the price of strategic control.

The wider music-industry context has not stood still during the standoff. Spotify is expanding its audiobook business into narrated journalism; AI-music platforms Suno and Udio continue to challenge the labels in licensing court; OpenAI has been visibly pushing into adjacent content categories.

The structural question Ackman framed was about UMG’s readiness for those shifts. The shareholder vote that would have decided the take-private offer is now moot, but the underlying strategic challenges remain, and the catalogue-owner business model UMG sits inside is genuinely under pressure from generative-AI substitutes for new releases.

For Pershing Square, the failed bid is the largest deal in the firm’s history not to close. Ackman has historically used activist campaigns to force changes in companies he could not buy outright, and the playbook from here points in that direction.

Pershing has already disclosed a sizeable open-market position in UMG; the next move is likely a proxy fight or a public campaign aimed at the board rather than at Bolloré directly.

Whether Ackman has the institutional support to mount that, given Bolloré’s controlling position, is a different question.

UMG shares fell modestly in early Amsterdam trading on Wednesday as the takeover premium unwound. Bolloré has not commented publicly beyond the rejection notice. Ackman has indicated Pershing Square will issue its formal response “in coming days”.