Companies that went public through mergers with SPACs in recent years booked billions of dollars in goodwill write-downs in 2022, reflecting in part a reckoning of the heady premiums paid to secure deals during the SPAC boom, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Some of the biggest goodwill impairments in 2022 came from SPAC-backed companies like cryptocurrency platform Bakkt Holdings, business-services provider Advantage Solutions, 3-D printing firm Fathom Digital Manufacturing, self-driving vehicle startup Aurora Innovation and now-bankrupt bitcoin miner Core Scientific, according to financial and risk advisory firm Kroll. Each of these five companies’ pretax impairments exceeded $1 billion last year. Read more.
