Billionaire Leon Black Is The Short Seller Killer Of 2016What is he doing now?
1. Leon Black offers $11 bln for Paramount's Hollywood studio Mar.20.2024
2. The agreement is a renegotiation of the deal Credit Suisse had reached with the U.S. buyout fund in the Swiss banking group's last-ditch attempts at a revamp to avoid collapse.
"This mutually beneficial agreement aligns with UBS's strategy of winding down and simplifying its non-core and legacy portfolio," UBS said on Wednesday. Mar.22.2024
What did he do 2016?
1. Black got off to an acquisitive start this year by striking a $6.9 billion deal in February to buy ADT, which on the eve of 2016 was one of the most heavily shorted companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. The home security company had become a target for short sellers who believed big cable companies like Comcast could leverage their relationships with homeowners and take ADT’s business. Apollo had been rolling up home security companies like Protection 1 and ASG Security and folded them into ADT. Apollo bought ADT for $42 a share, a 56% premium over ADT’s closing price on the last trading day before the deal was announced.
2. In June, Apollo put together a deal to buy Diamond Resorts International for $2.2 billion, which represented a 26% premium over where the company’s shares closed before the announcement. The stock had changed hands for less than $20 in May and Apollo paid $30.25 a share when the deal closed in September. The shares of the time-share resort company had a large short interest and some thought its business model was faulty and premised on overly aggressive sales tactics in an already sketchy industry.
3. Next up, Apollo shocked the shorts in July by entering into an agreement to buy Outerwall in a $1.6 billion deal. The owner of Red Box DVD rentals was the third-most shorted stock in America with short interest making up 46% of its public float. As a result of a shareholder push for a sale and Apollo’s purchase, shares of Outerwall are up 42% this year.
4. Finally, Apollo agreed at the end of August to buy Rackspace Hosting for $4.3 billion. Short sellers had bet heavily that larger companies like Amazon and Microsoft would continue to eat the lunch of the cloud-services company. Rackspace’s shares once changed hands for more than $80. Apollo agreed to buy them for $32 a share, which still represented a 38% premium to the level they closed at before reports of a potential deal surfaced in August.
