Silver Lake in Talks to Take Workday Private in Deal That Could Hit $43 Billion

Workday shares jumped this week after Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that private equity giant Silver Lake is in talks to take the enterprise software company private. A follow-up report via Investing.com put a potential price tag around $43 billion. CNBC's live markets desk independently corroborated the same sourcing and confirmed the stock's sharp move.

Neither company has said a word on the record. No 8-K filing. No merger proxy. No Schedule TO. No public document confirms talks are happening, what a deal structure would look like, or what price either side is actually discussing. Financing terms, timing, dilution, all of it remains unknown as of now.

Why Workday Is a Target

The financial case for a buyout is real, even if the deal itself isn't confirmed. Workday's fiscal 2026 annual report showed revenue of $9.55 billion and net income of $693 million for the year ending January 31, 2026. Its most recent quarterly filing, covering the three months through April 30, 2026, showed revenue of $2.54 billion, net income of $222 million, and diluted earnings per share of $0.87, up from $0.25 the year before.

That's a large, cash-generative, subscription-revenue business with steady quarterly growth. It's exactly the profile a leveraged buyout shop wants: predictable cash flow that can service a mountain of acquisition debt. Workday competes directly with SAP and Oracle in HR and finance software, and it's been layering AI features into its platform for workforce planning and financial anomaly detection.

The Elliott Question

Weeks before the Silver Lake report surfaced, activist investor Elliott Management disclosed a stake of more than $2 billion in Workday, according to MarketScreener, and publicly endorsed the existing management team. That disclosure alone sent shares up nearly 9% at the time.

An activist investor building a huge position and then publicly backing current leadership is often a precursor to a strategic review, not a straightforward takeover pitch. So which story is actually true: is Silver Lake circling Workday on its own initiative, or did Elliott's stake set a board-level process in motion that Silver Lake is now responding to?

Reuters' sourcing doesn't distinguish between those two scenarios. No primary document clears it up either. That question remains open, and it should be treated as unresolved until a filing or an on-record statement answers it.

Silver Lake's Track Record

Silver Lake isn't a stranger to nine-figure and ten-figure checks. The firm closed its $13 billion acquisition of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, in March 2025. It also picked up a majority stake in Intel's Altera unit for roughly $4.46 billion that same year. Going back further, Silver Lake was central to Dell Technologies' 2013 go-private deal, one of the largest LBOs of its era before Dell returned to public markets.

A $43 billion Workday deal would dwarf Endeavor and Altera combined. Silver Lake manages approximately $114 billion in assets, with a focus on technology and tech-enabled companies, so the firm has the scale to at least contemplate a deal this size. Whether it can actually finance it is a separate question.

The Debt Math Nobody's Confirmed

A buyout this large would require one of the biggest leveraged financing packages assembled in years. Debt markets aren't hostile right now, but they're not cheap either. Every dollar of that financing gets priced against current interest rates, and the terms lenders demand will shape whether Silver Lake can make the economics work at anything close to $43 billion.

What Happens Next

Workday is scheduled to report its fiscal 2027 second-quarter results on August 27, 2026. That earnings release could be the moment both sides get fresh data to either advance or abandon the talks. It's also the kind of event that tends to force clarity, or at least a leak, when a company is in active takeover discussions.

Until then, there's no confirmed deal, no price, no filing, and no on-record comment from either Silver Lake or Workday. The stock move is real. The deal, as of today, is not.