Ackman's $4 Billion SPAC Gives Up

Bill Ackman’s SPAC to Return $4 Billion to Investors

Two years after raising the largest-ever special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, the billionaire Bill Ackman has concluded that he will be unable to do a deal that meets its needs.

In a letter to shareholders on Monday, Mr. Ackman said he would return the funds of his $4 billion SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, because it was “unable to consummate a transaction that both meets our investment criteria and is executable.”

Opinion | Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?

Suppose, for example, that you use a digital payments app like Venmo, which has amply demonstrated its usefulness for real-world transactions (you can even use it to buy produce at sidewalk fruit stands). Well, if you go to Venmo’s home page, you encounter an invitation to use the app to “begin your crypto journey”; in the app itself, a “Crypto” tab appears right after “Home” and “Cards.” Surely, then, crypto must be serious business.

Suppose you want to learn about crypto. Many famous universities offer programs, typically online subscription courses.

Suppose you want to know who’s advising major players in the crypto industry. Well, the board of Digital Currency Group, one of the biggest players, includes a co-chair of the Brookings Institution’s board of trustees and boasts a former Treasury secretary as an adviser.

Given this aura of mainstream approval, how many people would have been willing to believe that the digital emperor had no clothes? More to the point, how many would have been willing to accept a regulatory crackdown?

The Price of Not Buying Twitter

Anyway, these outcomes are bad — everything is bad — but they are better than the binary outcomes in court, and I suppose it would be good if one of them happened. 7  If Musk wrote Twitter a check that was much bigger than $1 billion, then Twitter’s shareholders would be, not made whole, but at least mollified. And he might be a little chastened, and might stop going around pretending to buy public companies just to cause chaos. And Twitter would remain Twitter, which, you know, could be better, but could also be worse.

Of course there are obstacles here. Elon Musk is rich, weird and stubborn, and might not settle even when it’s in his best interests. Twitter’s directors are in an awkward spot: They are under a ton of scrutiny, they have a good legal case, and they will probably be sued by disgruntled shareholders if they settle for anything less than specific performance at $54.20 per share, even if doing so is in shareholders’ best interests. Nothing about this deal has been especially rational so far, and there is no reason to assume that it will settle rationally now. But it would be nice.

Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day

Crypto crashed, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. The dot-com stocks crashed in 2000 and 2001, but that didn’t mean the Internet was over.

That being said,  there’s a fundamental difference between dot-com stocks and cryptocurrencies. With the dot-coms, there’s a clear bright line between the stocks and the services. You could invest in Yahoo without using it as your search engine. Or you could use it as your search engine, without ever trading the stock. With crypto, it’s extremely hard to make this distinction. How much interest is there in “using” crypto or Web3 apps if there’s no money to be made?

What Is Delaware’s Court of Chancery and Its Role in Elon Musk’s Twitter Deal?

“If you want to have your business disputes resolved by experts, you will generally prefer Delaware,” said Joseph Grundfest, a professor of corporate governance at Stanford Law School. “You might be able to fool some judges somewhere, but you’re less likely to be able to fool these judges because they see this stuff all the time.”

The chancery court is intimately familiar with disputes involving mergers and acquisitions. Over the last two decades, it has ruled in disputes such as when a dissident shareholder fought a merger of the computer companies HP and Compaq in 2002; when the chemical company Hexion sued to end its merger with another chemical company, Huntsman, in 2008; and when the luxury companies LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Company sued each other over an acquisition in 2020.

Bankrupt Crypto Fund Three Arrows’ Founders Go Missing

Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection earlier this month, and the beleaguered fund’s legal team has said its co-founders are untraceable.

What Happened: The whereabouts of 3AC cofounders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies are unknown, according to court documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York.

“The Foreign representatives understand and believe that while the Debtor has had certain operations in Singapore, Mr. Davies and Mr. Zhu’s current location remains unknown. They are rumored to have left Singapore,” 3AC’s legal representatives said in the filing.