“A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there; pretty soon we’re talking about real money,” goes a quote universally credited to the late and legendary U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois.
While Dirksen himself disclaimed the aphorism, it remains a wonderfully pithy observation, not just about the federal budgeting process, but about the glibness that overtakes discussions of big sums of money.
There’ll be none of that here.
In 2024, there were 136 Texas-related* deals submitted to The Texas Lawbook‘s exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker that reached or broke the $1 billion barrier — some of them by a lot. The deals had an aggregate value of $640.6 billion.
*Reminder: A “Texas-related” deal is one that involves a party headquartered in Texas or advised by Texas-based lawyers.
That’s slightly above 130 billion-dollar deals totaling $628.8 billion in 2023. More to the point, that’s far higher than the 110 billion-dollar deals valued at $479.9 billion in 2021, the record year — a year of rebound from the pandemic — against which many firms have been measuring the market for the past few years.
Note that we ignored 2022. In June 2022, post-pandemic inflation reached its high point of 9.1 percent. The quick ramp-up and an anxious climb down throttled billion-dollar flow to 75 transactions totaling $261.5 billion, numbers nearly identical to those of 2019, three years before.
In fact, if we adjust the total value of billion-dollar deals in 2024 to account for inflation, the total would be lower than that of 2023. The 130 deals of 2023 become 134 and the 110 deals in 2021 become 128. It’s tricky.
Energy, of course, dominated the billion-dollar rankings with 28% of the deals (39) and 23.7 percent ($151.9 billion) of their total value. Manufacturing came in a distant second with 12 deals valued at $67.6 billion. Texas is still Texas.
But the energy numbers are deceptive. Driven by the energy demands of the hyperscale computing behind cloud storage, crypto mining and artificial intelligence, energy is rapidly nesting into the role of infrastructure. It makes simple business sector categorization increasingly difficult.
And nowhere is that difficulty more apparent than the $50 billion collaboration announced in October by KKR and Energy Capital Partners. The deal aims at the development of data centers, but more particularly the development of the power that will drive them. KKR was advised by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, led from their Houston office; ECP’s outside legal counsel is confidential.
And energy consolidation, at least on the grand scale we’ve seen in recent years, may be slowing. In 2023, there were 16 megadeals — transactions of $10 billion or more. Of those, eight were energy and mining. In 2024, there were 18 Texas-related megadeals and two of the top four were energy megadeals — but they were the only ones: Diamondback Energy’s $26 billion purchase of Endeavor Energy Resources and the $22.5 billion ConocoPhillips acquisition of Marathon Oil.
By contrast, there were six megadeals from various technology sectors, together valued at more than $135 billion.
