BOCA RATON, Fla.- Dec. 31, 2025 - DigitalBridge Group, Inc. ("DigitalBridge" or the "Company") (NYSE: DBRG), a leading global alternative asset manager dedicated to investing in digital infrastructure, and Crestview Partners ("Crestview"), a leading private equity firm, today announced that affiliated investment funds have completed their previously announced take-private acquisition of WideOpenWest, Inc. ("WOW!"), a top provider of fiber-broadband internet services and advanced connectivity solutions in the United States.
Last month, we asked readers to donate to a couple of good causes in our 2025 Charity Drive sweepstakes. And boy, did you deliver. With the drive now complete and the donations all tallied, we can report that Ars Technica readers gave an incredible $42,936.83 to Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in this year's drive. That doesn't set a new record, but it beats last year's total and raises our lifetime Ars Charity Drive donation haul since 2007 to over $585,000.
SwimQuest's annual Isles of Scilly challenge is a 15km island-hopping swim, broken into five sessions with walks in between. The longest swim is the 6km leg from St Agnes to Bryher; the shortest is 600 metres from Bryher to Tresco; and the island walks in between are no longer than 45 minutes. Swimmers can opt to complete the challenge in one tough day, or space it out over two
Money was no object for the AI industry in early 2025. A vibe check crept in the second half of the year. OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machine Labs raised individual $2 billion seed rounds before shipping a single product. Even first-time founders were raising at a scale that once belonged only to Big Tech.
While they are frequently criticized for being performative or symbolic rather than genuinely impactful, CSR initiatives can be deeply meaningful for organizations, employees, not to mention entire communities. First and foremost, well-designed and comprehensive CSR programs generate positive social change for underserved communities and groups, address vital social and environmental causes, and allow welfare organizations to extend the quality and scale of their contributions.
Whether it's an ornament at the bottom of the box, or a nutcracker collecting dust in the attic, hand-me-down decorations can find a new home thanks to one local high school student and his mom. Grant Benedum and his mom, Christine, created a mission called, 'Giving Garland,' earlier this year. They have partnered with Norwood-Fontbonne Academy and Our Mother of Consolation Catholic Church in Chestnut Hill to collect decorations from students, parishioners, and their families.
Ellison's $40 billion promise to personally back his son's Paramount deal is not a charitable donation in the classic sense. It is something more emblematic of this billionaire era: philanthropic capitalism, where vast personal fortunes are deployed through markets rather than around them, and "giving it away" increasingly means reshaping industries instead of writing checks to traditional charities. It lands at the exact moment that the older model of billionaire philanthropy-epitomized
"I vividly remember what it's like as a kid backpacking around the world to need a shower, to need a place to wash your clothes," Steves told a crowd who gathered on Wednesday to celebrate the purchase over cake and with words fait accompli written in red icing. Many homeless people had come to depend on the Lynnwood Hygiene Center, which had operated rent-free on the property since 2020.
Members of Brownie Troop 60125 volunteered at the Family Giving Tree warehouse in Sunnyvale on Dec. 7, sorting, wrapping and organizing gifts and getting them ready for bagging for the nonprofit's Holiday Wish Drive. The troop also hosted a Virtual Giving Tree along with Junior Troop 60174, adopting 25 wish cards, and used cookie sale proceeds to shop for gifts at Pennyland Toys in Campbell, which offered the troops a discount.
While mega-buyouts remain subdued, a quieter but significant shift is under way: the rise of co-investments in private markets. After two years of muted activity, UK-focused private equity firms are increasingly targeting mid-market opportunities, platform acquisitions and bolt-on deals, particularly in sectors offering resilient cash flows such as healthcare, business services, technology infrastructure and energy transition. According to industry figures, deal volumes are stabilising, even as valuations remain below the peaks of 2021.
Clenching a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other, Amber Levine-Mickel furiously sweeps a dirt walkway in Sunnyvale, bending small pebbles, fallen leaves and branches to her will. For over an hour, the 31-year-old and her companions from Life Services Alternatives (LSA) are braving the cold to tidy the grounds of Animal Assisted Happiness, a family-friendly barnyard in the city. Levine-Mickel loves to volunteer there every Thursday morning, even if the tasks can get tiresome.
MoEngage, a customer engagement platform used by consumer brands across 75 countries, has raised $180 million in a Series F follow-on round just over a month after securing $100 million, with a majority of the latest funding providing liquidity to investors and employees through secondary transactions. In the latest raise, about $123 million was secondary, including a $15 million employee tender that provided liquidity to 259 current and former employees, while the remaining $57 million was raised as primary capital and went into the business.
One proposal would reduce capital stock and capital reserves, allowing funds to be transferred to surplus. This would enable dividends, share buybacks, or bitcoin acquisitions without increasing the number of outstanding common shares. Another proposal seeks to increase the company's authorized share count, including the introduction of new preferred share classes. Metaplanet said this would allow it to raise capital in the future to fund bitcoin purchases while preserving flexibility in its capital structure.
When the U.S. government cut funding for local news stations, the Knight Foundation moved quickly to help stabilize a rapidly eroding industry. President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth unpacks the evolving roles of philanthropy and government, and why philanthropic organizations must learn to move at the speed of the news cycle. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian.
I already said thank you, but should I say anything else? GENTLE READER: What would you say? Something along the lines of, I have no use for this, so I'm going to get rid of it? Countering generosity by mentioning what a failure it was does not make anyone's Christmas merrier. Not even yours, next Christmas, when this client will have been discouraged by the effort to please you and will give up trying.
Solomon Smith said he founded the charity with money from his job as a youth worker after being unable to secure funding for the project. He began helping others after witnessing poverty among his peers as a child. He said: "We got cooked meals every day. It's not until I was actually going to my friend's house, when I realised poverty. I realised that if they didn't go out and steal, they were not eating."
It's possible I was in attendance that very same year: my father, a street racer in his youth, was certainly aware of PIR and my mother had always been a Christmas lights enthusiast, trucking us from neighborhood to brightly-lit neighborhood. I'm not certain, but I do have distinct childhood memories of slowly circling that track, watching the festive lights go by.
The deal, via Collegiate Athletic Solutions, known as CAS, follows failed talks earlier in the year for a direct investment into the Big 12, and would mark the first major conference-wide capital deal in major US college sports. The partnership would offer the 16 member universities a line of credit of roughly $30 million each and is close to being finalized, the person added, asking not to be named discussing private information.
Atkins noted that the number of publicly registered companies has fallen over the past 30 years as mergers and bankruptcies have outpaced new listings. His goal, he said, is to "make it cool to be a public company" again-something he believes has "taken a hit over time." Atkins outlined three obstacles he believes are holding issuers back. The first is what he described as expensive, overly long disclosures that impose an unnecessary burden on issuers.
The company apologized and issued changes. GoFundMe used to charge a platform fee to cover the costs of running their business. However, in late 2017, the company removed that platform fee and shifted to an optional tipping model. And some 7 On Your Side viewers argue that model can be unfair and misleading. Brenda's nephew has stage 4 pancreatic cancer and has been in the hospital for the past month.
