Kleenex Maker Kimberly-Clark Trolls RFK Jr. with $48.7B Tylenol Deal (Shares Catapult 17%)

RFK Jr.: My plan is working… Tylenol sales are slowing…

Kimberly-Clark: Let’s buy the M’fn dip.

Nothing like a little controversy to kick off November (and yes, Mariah Carey is already defrosted). Anyways, everyone’s favorite tissuemaker just dropped $48.7 billion to buy Tylenol’s parent company, Kenvue.

If you’ve ever had a baby, allergies, or a hangover… give yourself a round of applause… you’re now single-handedly funding this merger. The Huggies and Kleenex crew now officially own the thing RFK’s been beefing with on cable news.

(Source: CNBC)

Kenvue, if you forgot, was spun out of Johnson & Johnson last year to “stand on its own.” Unfortunately, it spent the next 18 months falling 35% and begging someone else to pick it back up. Kimberly-Clark took one look and said “say less.”

The deal’s a mix of cash and stock, valuing Kenvue at $21.01 a share… and gave the stock a nice 20% premarket jump. Kimberly-Clark’s stock, meanwhile, slid 14%... probably because investors can already picture RFK loading another Tylenol rant into the teleprompter.

Together, they’ll form a $32 billion-a-year consumer-staples monopoly with ten billion-dollar brands. The companies say it’s all about “extraordinary care” and “science and technology.” Which is another way of saying “we’re jacking prices and there aint nothing you can do about it. There’s also $1.9 billion in “cost synergies” expected… Wall Street’s favorite euphemism for “we’re firing people, but efficiently.”

CEO Mike Hsu called it a “powerful next step” in Kimberly-Clark’s transformation into a “higher-growth, higher-margin” company. “We’re done selling tissues to allergy kids… we want a piece of that Big Pharma drug money. The deal’s expected to close in the back half of 2026, assuming regulators (and RFK) don’t turn it into a congressional hearing.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Johnson & Johnson as mentioned in the article.