Activision Blizzard: Warren Buffett, Barry Diller and David Geffen had a formidable sense of timing

(Boursier.com) — We already knew that Warren Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathawayhad shown a very good intuition at the end of last year by investing in the file of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard. Berkshire, usually not very fond of technological files, had thus acquired 14.7 million Activision titles at the end of 2021, just before Microsoft does not launch a takeover bid on the game publisher! According to statements to regulators, the Berkshire purchases were made during the last three months of 2021. Immediately after, Microsoft announced, in January, an agreement to buy the publisher in an all-in transaction. cash valued at $68.7 billion, including Activision Blizzard’s net cash. Once the transaction is finalized, Microsoft would become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.

Berkshire estimated its 14.7 million shares in the publisher of ‘Candy Crush’ and ‘Call of Duty’ were worth around $975 million at the end of 2021. As of yesterday’s close of trading, they were worth $1.19 billion. bucks! Recall that Buffett has long avoided investing in technology companies. It has since evolved, with Berkshire in particular being a very large shareholder of Apple since 2016 with around 5% of the shares. In the fourth quarter, the group at the apple even represented 47.6% of the assets of the investment firm.

We also learn this week that Berkshire is not the only renowned investor to have invested in a formidable timing on the Activision Blizzard file. The Wall Street Journal reports that options trading linked to Activision would be monitored by US financial authorities. The WSJ understands that Barry Diller and David Geffen would be among the big names who made such purchases of options in the days preceding the formalization of the merger between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. According to WSJ sources, Diller, Geffen and Alexander von Furstenberg would show an unrealized gain of around $60 million on options trades linked to Activision. The gains are certainly less impressive than those of Berkshire, but the positions taken in January, just before the takeover bid, are quite astonishing.