In February Workday's answer was its founder. In August it might be Silver Lake.
Reuters says Silver Lake has spent months in talks over a take-private at more than $50 billion. Six months ago, Workday's answer to the same problem was paying its founder $138.8 million to fix it in public.
Workday was worth about $43 billion on Wednesday. By Thursday's close it was worth roughly $51 billion, and nothing inside the company had changed. Reuters reported that Silver Lake has been in talks for months about taking the software company private at more than $50 billion, the shares rose 18% to $206.45, and the market added eight billion dollars of value on the strength of somebody else's interest.
The talks are preliminary and may not produce a deal, according to the people Reuters spoke to, and Silver Lake could bring in other investors to fund it. Neither company has commented on the report. What the wire copy skips is what Workday was telling its shareholders six months ago.
On 9 February, Carl Eschenbach stepped down as chief executive and co-founder Aneel Bhusri returned to the job he had left two years earlier. Around 400 roles went, about 2% of staff. The stock closed down 5% on the day. Fortune reported the terms of Bhusri's package: $138.8 million in total, of which $75 million pays out only against undisclosed share price targets over five years, and roughly $60 million vests on nothing more demanding than staying four years. The stock had by then fallen 51% from an intraday peak of $311.28, cutting the market value in half from $80 billion and taking about $1.3 billion off Bhusri's own holding on paper.
Credit where it is due, that is a more performance-linked package than most founder returns produce, and hitting the top of it would require more than doubling the share price. But the proposition to public shareholders was clear enough: the founder is back, he is paid in your currency, and the recovery happens here, in front of you. The reported answer to the same problem in August is to stop doing it in front of you.
Whatever number Silver Lake eventually puts on the table, the negotiation is narrower than a $51 billion company implies. Workday's Class B shares carry ten votes each, and a voting agreement dating to the 2012 listing leaves Bhusri and co-founder David Duffield with 68% of the voting power, per Fortune's reading of the filings. The structure does not lapse until October 2032. A take-private here is a conversation between a buyer and two men; everybody else on the register receives a price, a proxy and a date. Our read is that the live question is not what Workday is worth, but what its founders think it is worth, and those two numbers have been drifting apart since 2024.
