position in it through his hedge fund. Most of the story was fake news, unfortunately. DU even got fact-checked by PolitiFact.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.statesman.com/amp/8211621002
Democratic Underground: “The second-largest investor in Regeneron” is a firm whose CEO is Ron DeSantis’ “number one political donor.”
PolitiFact's Ruling: Mostly False
Here's why: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked out positions contrary to public health guidance on COVID-19, opposing some preventive measures, while emphasizing treatment. Now the Republican is being accused by a liberal group of favoring one of his political donors in his response to the pandemic.
DeSantis "has been discouraging masking and downplaying Covid vaccines," and instead is urging Floridians to use a treatment from the drug company Regeneron "after getting infected," Democratic Underground says in an Instagram post. "You’ll be amazed to learn that the second-largest investor in Regeneron is Citadel Investment Group," whose CEO, Ken Griffin, is "DeSantis’ number one political donor," the post claims.
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. Griffin is a major campaign donor to DeSantis, but his firm is only a small investor in Regeneron, and one of more than a thousand institutions with a stake in the company.
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Citadel is not Regeneron's second-largest investor
To support the first part of its claim — that Citadel Investment Group is the second-largest investor in Regeneron — Democratic Underground cited a June 28 Yahoo Finance article that says "the second-largest stake" in Regeneron is held by Citadel Investment Group, which "holds a $171.2 million call position." But that article was referring to a group of 39 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey, a finance website. Among those 39 hedge funds, the article said, Citadel had the second-largest investment in Regeneron. That does not make it the second-largest overall investor in Regeneron — not by a long shot.
The article said Citadel’s position was a $171.2 million call position. A call position by itself does not represent ownership — it’s an option to purchase stock. Asked about that discrepancy, Democratic Underground changed the text in its post to mention the call position and added a correction, but still erroneously referred to Citadel holding the second-largest call position in Regeneron.
Data from Nasdaq shows that as of June 30, Regeneron had more than 1,000 institutional investors. The top five were FMR LLC (known as Fidelity Investments), Blackrock, Vanguard Group, Capital World Investors and State Street. Each had between 4 million and 11 million shares. Citadel Advisors, part of Griffin’s company, owned 57,768 shares as of June 30, tripling its holdings from the previous quarter, according to Nasdaq. That amounts to less than 0.1% of Regeneron’s 105 million shares outstanding.
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more at the link
= new reply since forum marked as read
