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NewslettersMPW Daily

Bumble’s buyout, Netflix’s shake-up, Reese Witherspoon’s do-over, and a wild week in business

Emma Hinchliffe
By
Emma Hinchliffe
Emma Hinchliffe
Most Powerful Women Editor
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Emma Hinchliffe
By
Emma Hinchliffe
Emma Hinchliffe
Most Powerful Women Editor
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October 16, 2026, 12:46 PM ET
Reese Witherspoon is buying back Hello Sunshine after selling to Blackstone's Candle Media for almost $1 billion.
Reese Witherspoon is buying back Hello Sunshine after selling to Blackstone's Candle Media for almost $1 billion.
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While my colleagues and I were busy breaking news at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit all week, of course the world decided that this should an extraordinarily busy news week too!

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Let’s recap some of what I missed while we were in Santa Barbara:

  • Bumble is going private in a $1.3 billion deal, down more than 90% from its IPO high of $14 billion. With the take-private deal, founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is leaving her role as CEO (for the second time, this time staying involved as a “close partner”). Bumble’s new leaders will be Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman, the co-CEOs of Ithaca Holdings.
  • Reese Witherspoon, with the firm Mediawan, is buying back Hello Sunshine, five years after selling it to Blackstone’s Candle Media for more than $900 million. Both Hello Sunshine and Bumble were acquired by Blackstone – and while the deals may have paid off for the firm financially by some measures, neither seems to have found long-term success.
  • Zola, the weddings platform founded by Shan-Lyn Ma, was just acquired by The Knot. Ma founded Zola more than a decade ago. The deal merges two major players in the wedding tech category.
  • And yesterday, Netflix ousted its longtime content head Bela Bajaria. Bajaria was No. 35 on the 2026 Most Powerful Women list. She’s been at Netflix for a decade and has been behind such successes as Squid Games and Kpop Demon Hunters. Her replacement is Peter Rice, the former chairman of general entertainment at Disney. Netflix’s stock is down around 40% over the past year, and it just did its biggest round of layoffs since 2022.

A lot can happen while you’re onstage. As we have time to digest everything we learned at the MPW Summit, I’ll have more for you next week, from my interviews with the leaders behind Kalshi, OnlyFans, across women’s sports, and more. Thanks for following along this week – more news below.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

Can AI apps be a mom's second brain? Ollie, Fambot, Ohai, and Ava are among those making the argument that AI could be the solution to the mental load.

A sneak peak from Daniela Amodei. The Anthropic president (No. 22 on the 2026 Most Powerful Women list) is in conversation with Arianna Huffington for an interview airing at Alice Walton’s AI and Health conference in Bentonville. We have an exclusive preview. They talk about the relationship between humans and AI, with a guiding question: We keep hearing about how AI can recursively improve, but so can people, right? AI will not just take on more and more work, Amodei says, but will "expand the definition of what it means to do human work." Meanwhile, Anthropic is on track to go public before Thanksgiving. 

"I'm personally sorry." So says Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff over the school's handling of Jane Doe's gang rape. He also says he first learned of the incident in late 2024, but did not follow up with the student, didn't know she had dropped out of Cornell, and never tried to find out whether any of the accused men had been punished. Meanwhile, Cornell's board of trustees just met and the faculty senate is considering a no-confidence vote. 

ON MY RADAR

The doxing of Jane Doe New Yorker

Sian Clifford stole scenes in Fleabag. Now she's back for more NYT

The difficulty of diagnosing anorexia in the GLP-1 era NYT

PARTING WORDS

"When a young man gets a big job in our world, it’s not really that interesting, because it happens often. When a young woman gets a big job, which happened to me, it’s a little more interesting because it’s rare." 

— Bridget Griswold, the new(ish) 25-year-old CEO of Lean In, at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit 

This is the web version of MPW Daily, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
About the Author
Emma Hinchliffe
By Emma HinchliffeMost Powerful Women Editor
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Emma Hinchliffe is Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor, overseeing editorial for the longstanding franchise. As a senior writer at Fortune, Emma has covered women in business and gender-lens news across business, politics, and culture. She is the lead author of the Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter (formerly the Broadsheet), Fortune’s daily missive for and about the women leading the business world.

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