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FT Alphaville has to admit, we did not have conspiracy-addled Vivek Ramaswamy going activist on the rump of BuzzFeed on its 2024 bingo card.
Yet here we are:
The Reporting Person believes the securities of the Issuer are undervalued and represent an attractive investment opportunity.
The Reporting Person will seek to engage in a dialogue with the Issuer’s Board of Directors (the “Board”) and/or management about numerous operational and strategic opportunities to maximize shareholder value, including a shift in the Company’s strategy. The Reporting Person may consider, explore and/or develop plans and/or make proposals (whether preliminary or firm) with respect to, among other things, the matters set forth in the previous paragraph and potential changes in the Issuer’s operations, management, organizational documents, Board composition, ownership, capital or corporate structure, sale transactions, dividend policy, and strategy and plans.
The Reporting Person intends to communicate with the Issuer’s management and Board about, and may enter into negotiations with them regarding, the foregoing and a broad range of operational and strategic matters and to communicate with other shareholders or third parties, including potential acquirers, service providers, and financing sources regarding the Issuer.
If it isn’t clear, the ‘Reporting Person’ is Ramaswamy — former Republican presidential candidate, self-styled anti-woke warrior and all-round attention-seeker — who has revealed a 7.7 per cent stake in the content factory, bought for $3.9mn.
The schedule indicates that Ramaswamy began accumulating his 2.7mn shares in mid-March, and that he has also amassed calls expiring between June 2024 and January 2025 for another 210,000 shares at a $2 strike price.
Given the recent upward trajectory of BuzzFeed’s shares — and the spike that followed the news of Ramaswamy’s stake — those calls are now comfortably in the money (he also owns 39,000 warrants with a strike price of $46, but that seems a bit out of reach).
Exercising them would make Ramaswamy BuzzFeed’s third-largest shareholder, behind only Comcast and New Enterprise Associates, according to LSEG data.
But BuzzFeed isn’t what it once was. It went public though a shrivelled Spac deal in 2021 but that ended up a disaster, with the shares collapsing from over $10 to a nadir beneath a buck earlier this year. The Pulitzer Prize-winning but awesomely unprofitable BuzzFeed News was finally shuttered last year, leaving Huffington Post as its the group’s news site. More valuable assets like Complex have already been sold off.
So it’s hard to know what Ramaswamy really wants with this move, aside from attention.
Oh.
Read the full article here