US-based short-seller Hindenburg research jolted Gautam Adani led Adani group in the first month of this year, making both the billionaire, as well as his companies' stocks, lose billions of dollars.
While Adani was neither the first nor the only target for Hindenburg research this year, he was certainly the biggest one yet. And the short-seller did not stop at that.?
After Adani group, Hindenburg reports one by one rattled Twitter's former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey and 87-year-old American billionaire Carl Icahn as well.
In just a few months this year, Hindenburg research, which is run by its founder Nathan Anderson, has erased as much as $99 billion of these three billionaires' combined wealth, as per Bloomberg.?And that's not all,?Hindenburg reports have also knocked off $173 billion from the value of these billionaires' publicly traded companies.
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Hindenburg came out with its report mentioning how?Gautam Adani is pulling the largest con in corporate history.?Hindenburg mentioned that based on its research, it has?taken a short position in Adani Group Companies?through U.S.-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivative instruments. It has accused the Adani Group of accounting fraud, stock manipulations, and money laundering.
From being Asia's richest and the world's third richest person at the beginning of this year, Hindenburg report's attack resulted in Adani being out of the world's 20 richest people list, even to date.
For the unversed,?short-selling?is an investment strategy with the motive of "buying low and selling high" to cash in some gains.?Investors who short-sell stocks expect share prices to drop at some future date and aim to capitalize on this prediction to fetch some profits.
After rattling the?Adani group, Hindenburg research targeted Twitter co-founder?Jack Dorsey's company Block.?Block is an American multinational technology firm founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey.
In a tweet shared today evening,?Hindenburg research titled the?report:?Block—How Inflated User Metrics and "Frictionless" Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion.
After rattling the?Adani?group and then?Jack Dorsey's Block,?Hindenburg Research came out with another report,?targeting another billionaire's firm.?Hindenburg's report criticised?American conglomerate?Icahn Enterprises, quickly leading to a nearly 20% drop in the shares of 87-year-old activist investor and billionaire Carl Icahn's firm right after the report came out.
That turned out to be a?rare and unexpected challenge for billionaire Icahn, who, as one of the pioneers of shareholder activism, is accustomed to dressing down companies over their governance and transparency but has not had to field such criticism himself. Even as recently as this month, the shares of the company crashed further after it?cut dividends in half?just a few months after Hindenburg's attack triggered a selling frenzy in its shares.??
Also Read:?How Rajiv Jain Made Rs 3,100 Crore Profit On?Adani?Stocks In 2 Days
Few of Hindenburg founder Anderson's previous interviews seem to make it clear that money isn’t his main motivator.?Anderson, who lives in a two-bedroom luxury apartment he rents in Manhattan, has said he makes a “very good living.” What drives him is exposing what he sees as misbehaviour and knocking down companies he deems offensively overblown. One competitor calls it the classic mindset of a short-seller: a compulsion to understand how the world is screwed up and call it out.
Since 2020, Hindenburg has taken aim at about 30 companies, knocking their stocks down about 15% on average in the day that followed, as per the Bloomberg report.??
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