Gen Digital fell 12% for making a bid. MGM fell 11% for losing one.

Gen Digital fell 12.05% on Thursday, its worst day in the price history this site holds, going back to February 2025. MGM Resorts fell 11.01%, its worst day over the same stretch. Both drops came from takeover news, from opposite ends of a deal: Gen Digital was reported to be the bidder, and MGM was the company whose bidder walked away.

They were the S&P 500's two worst performers on a day the index itself closed down just 0.03%.

Gen Digital: the bidder paid, not the target

The Financial Times reported that $GEN, the owner of Norton, Avast and LifeLock, had made a preliminary takeover approach for $GDDY. According to Proactive's write-up of the report, no financial terms were disclosed and no agreement had been reached.

Here is what the two companies' market values did on the day:

Gen Digital lost about 3.4 times what GoDaddy gained, so the pair ended the day $1.33 billion lighter combined.

Two other figures from the map put that gap in context:

• The two companies are close in size. At Thursday's close, Gen Digital's market cap was only about 8% larger than GoDaddy's. This is not a large company absorbing a small one.
• GoDaddy's gain faded. Proactive reported GoDaddy up 11% during the session. It closed up 4.61%. On our own history that is not an unusual day for the stock: GoDaddy has had five larger single-day gains since 28 July, including a 7.50% rise on 21 September.

Volume shows how much of Gen Digital's float changed hands. 32.1 million shares traded, against an average of 5.7 million a day over the previous 50 sessions, about 5.6 times normal. GoDaddy traded 9.5 million shares against a 2.1 million average.

Thursday's drop also came at the end of a three-day slide. $GEN fell 6.38% on Tuesday and 3.88% on Wednesday before Thursday's 12.05%, taking it from $29.15 at Monday's close to $23.07, a fall of 20.9% in three sessions. The report came out on Thursday; the data here cannot say whether the two earlier declines had anything to do with it.

MGM: the offer that set a floor is gone

$MGM closed at $33.68, down 11.01%, after People Inc., Barry Diller's company, withdrew the cash proposal it made in June to take MGM private at $48.30 a share. 24/7 Wall St. reported that People Inc. owns about 27% of MGM, and that MGM's board said it would continue as a standalone company. Diller said People Inc. had decided not to pursue taking the company private "at this time".

Thursday's close is 30.3% below the withdrawn $48.30 offer. The drop took $1.07 billion off MGM's market value, leaving it at $8.62 billion.

Volume was 19.7 million shares, about 8.3 times MGM's 50-day average of 2.4 million.

The move stayed with MGM. The other casino operators in the S&P 500 fell far less:

24/7 Wall St. also noted Caesars Entertainment was up 0.3% early in the session. Caesars is not in the S&P 500 snapshot this site tracks, so its close is not shown here.

Why two $1–2 billion moves matter on a flat day

Neither company is big enough to move the index. Gen Digital's $1.89 billion loss is less than a tenth of what Walmart alone took off the S&P 500 on Thursday. But on a day when the index barely moved and 326 of its 500 members closed lower, the two deal stories stand out on the treemap as the two deepest red tiles in their sectors.

They also show two different ways a takeover story reprices a stock:

• For a bidder, it was the company that would have to fund the deal that lost value. Gen Digital did not name a price, so the drop was a reaction to the approach being reported, with no terms to judge.
• For a target that loses its offer, the offer price stops acting as a reference point. With the $48.30 bid gone, MGM closed 30% below it.

Neither story is finished. The GoDaddy approach is described as preliminary, and 24/7 Wall St. reported that Diller left room for other strategic options with MGM. The map above shows where both stood at Thursday's close.