'Block would have walked away': How Afterpay snuck through the deal of a lifetime
While it's well-established that Block’s record acquisition of Afterpay came at the top of the market, one part of the story remains untold: how close the deal may have come to falling apart.
It was a lonely existence for Tom Beadle when he covered Afterpay for UBS.
As stock in the buy now, pay later company soared and soared, the media and tech analyst’s valuation and what the market said Afterpay was worth, drifted further and further apart.
Beadle had covered the payments platform since October 2019 with veteran banking analyst Jonathan Mott for the Swiss investment bank. The duo believed it was trading for at least double what it was really worth.
“The Afterpay narrative never made any sense to me,” Beadle, who now works at Jarden, told Capital Brief. “They said they were disruptive yet there were existing players in the payments and lending spaces offering services at much cheaper costs.”
