Why is Vivek Ramaswamy buying up shares of BuzzFeed?
Let's start by stating the obvious: It is very funny to type the sentence "Why is Vivek Ramaswamy buying up shares of BuzzFeed?"
Ramaswamy, as you may recall, was a fringe candidate in the most recent Republican presidential primary, where his platform consisted of praising Donald Trump and promising to "Take America First further than Trump." He dropped out of the race in January, after spending a reported $30 million of his own money on the campaign and coming in fourth in the Iowa caucuses.
And BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed — the cheeky digital publisher that sprouted up alongside Facebook and, at one point, seemed poised to become the future of media. At its peak, it sported a valuation of nearly $2 billion and had a knack for commanding the attention of millennials, advertisers, and old media giants like The New York Times, which worried that BuzzFeed would displace it.
By the time BuzzFeed went public in 2021, however, almost all of the air had left the digital publishing bubble. Since then BuzzFeed has gone through multiple layoff rounds, unwound a big M&A deal that was the supposed reason for its IPO in the first place, and its stock sank so low it risked getting kicked off the Nasdaq.
And now Ramaswamy has bought up 7.7% of BuzzFeed — for a little less than $4 million — and announced that he will be an activist investor — someone who thinks the company's shares are undervalued and that he can convince BuzzFeed's management to make changes that will make the shares worth more.
One issue complicating any of Ramaswamy's plans is that BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti controls the company, even though he owns a minority of its shares, due to a dual-class stock structure.
But that doesn't mean Peretti is immune to shareholder pressure. Just this month, he announced a new plan that ties his compensation to the company's stock performance in an attempt to convince investors that he's really serious about turning things around.
So, again: What's Ramaswamy's actual plan?
Ramaswamy has yet to talk to BuzzFeed's board or management, says a person familiar with the company. And neither BuzzFeed nor Ramaswamy has responded to requests for comment, so we're just going to have to guess here. A few theories from the peanut gallery: