Rebekah proves you can’t buy talent…
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Yeah. I’ve been in a lawsuit or two with folks in that business. Basically people doing what computers whose code is no longer comprehensible by humans tell them to do and making vast sums of money from it.
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Didja hear about the Pole who was running around looking for a slim jim to unlock his car because the wife had the key and had locked herself inside.
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Murdochs, Sinclair, Clear Channel, and now the Mercers.
They call it free speech, but increasingly, the right seems to be spending a ton of bucks buying it up in bulk.
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She must not have had Blonde-Star…
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Thought 2.5M shares representing 2.5% was rather a wild statistic, nc.
But Time Inc is about 100M shares total. Bizarre.
However, even 2.5% still is significant clout for a struggling magazine, no?
Shareholders are basically powerless in American corporations unless they have enough shares to elect a director. You can get those votes by buying shares. You can get those votes by collecting proxies. Most elected directors on large publicly traded corporations (as opposed to directors selected by directors or serving ex officio under the charter or bylaws) are there through the votes of mutual funds and pension funds. 2.5% makes you a nice target for a proxy solicitation. And it’s not uncommon for greenmailers like Ichan (not to be confused with 4chan) who want to force a corporation to “unlock value” and give it to shareholders to buy a stake of that size as a starting point. They get a big enough stake to be taken seriously and then start trying to collect proxies with mass mailing to shareholders showing how if only the company would sell off all of its operating assets and liquidate its reserves, it could pay a big dividend or fund a stock buy-back.
But yeah, I don’t think this is any of those things. If the Mercers had combed out the money between their couch cushions and bought it themselves, yeah. Absolutely. But Renaissance?
No. I’ve been persuaded that this is most likely just an example of a computer churning though a ton of data and deciding for some reason that is utterly unfathomable to humans that a big order for Time Inc. stock needed to be placed. And I don’t think anyone’s going to be interested in playing any greenmail games with that stake because they honestly don’t know why the computer decided to buy and they don’t want to mess up the underlying assumptions.
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“Other shoe” here could be that the actual source of the money for the purchase, at least in part, is another oligarch, a Russian oligarch, an oligarch such as Dmitry Rybolovlev.
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This is big nothing burger. Renaissance is a quant firm.
Time’s market capitalization is 1.4 billion. This transaction is 48 million (0.048 B). They are not trying for a controlling interest – just an investment in a corporation with a profitable future.