‘Mysterious’ billionaire cashes in $127M worth of Gates-backed pharma stock
Schrödinger, Inc. is having a big year
David Shaw is a stock market legend
Indeed, the mostly-retired Shaw is famous among Wall Street insiders. His fund DE Shaw & Co. was one of the industry’s first ever “quant” shops, which use powerful computer algorithms to identify lucrative short-term trading signals.
The Financial Times notedDE Shaw & Co’s Composite fund has posted just one annual loss since 2001 (in 2008), and returned double-digit profits in seven of the past 10 years. This year, however, the outlook is looking a little grim.
But Shaw isn’t the only prominent billionaire balls-deep in SDGR. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is there too, having bought nearly $100 million worth of SDGR stock during its IPO.
Gates alsoinvested in the company’s$85 million venture capital raise last year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation currently holds around $320 million in SDGR shares.In fact, Shaw and Gates own around 40% of all SDGR stock. This gives the two billionaires huge sway at the company, a situation short-selling crewCitron Research deemedeven more extreme than the Musk-heavy power structure at Tesla.
“Beyond the ‘dollars invested,’ what is significant about the investment of those two men who are known for their intellectual prowess is the validation that Schrödinger is on the forefront of using artificial intelligence and computational chemistry to streamline the drug discovery process,” wrote Citron analysts in February.
“David Shaw upon his retirement from DE Shaw has dedicated his life to computational biochemistry; Schrodinger is the result of much of this work.”
[Read: Tech’s market debutantes overshadowed by Gates-backed pharma stock]
As for how much SDGR stock Gates has dumped in 2020: $129.5 million, a couple of million dollars more than Shaw, and the two billionaires are together responsible for more than 80% of all SDGR insider sales year-to-date.
Story byDavid Canellis
David is a tech journalist who loves old-school adventure games, techno and the Beastie Boys. He’s currently on the finance beat.David is a tech journalist who loves old-school adventure games, techno and the Beastie Boys. He’s currently on the finance beat.
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