Matt Levine, Columnist

Bed Bath Strikes From the Beyond

Section 16 blockers, General Private Markets, Bridgewater, the EA castle and gentleman drivers.

May 9, 2024 at 6:59 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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In the first few months of 2023, on its way into bankruptcy, Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. sold a ton of stock. In January 2023, it had about 117.3 million shares outstanding, worth about $3.35 each; by April, it had 739.1 million, worth about $0.30 each. Then it went bankrupt and now the shares are worth zero, though you can find contrarian views.

These stock sales always struck me as extraordinarily cynical: Bed Bath pretty much knew that it would be filing for bankruptcy with no recovery for shareholders, but it went out and raised a few hundred million dollars from meme-stock retail investors to hand directly to creditors. I wrote: