Matt Levine, Columnist

It’s Good to Win a Proxy Fight

Also AMC, short volatility, SPAC warrants, Archegos, ECM, dodgy, nerdy and business music.

June 1, 2021 at 4:42 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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We talked a couple of times last week about the plucky and successful activist campaign that hedge fund Engine No. 1 LLC waged against Exxon Mobil Corp. I wrote on Thursday:

Well! About a hundred of you emailed me to say that it’s obvious what’s in it for Engine No. 1: publicity. This is a hedge fund that launched six months ago; it runs a small fund and doesn’t have much of a track record. Now it is The Little Engine That Took Down Exxon. It has gone from nothing to being a daring successful activist, and an activist with a halo of environmental virtue. It can fundraise off of that forever, attract lots of money, collect lots of fees, etc. The $30 million of proxy expenses are an investment to make millions more in management fees.