Florida hedge fund could reap around $200 million from big arbitrage bet on Twitter
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Among the big winners in Elon Musk’s agreement to follow through with his deal to buy Twitter is an activist hedge fund based in a coastal Florida city that was just wrecked by Hurricane Ian.
Pentwater Capital, a 15-year-old firm with close to $5 billion in assets, bought a 2.4% stake in Twitter during the second quarter. The purchase of 18.1 million shares cost Pentwater roughly $725 million.
At $54.20, the price Musk has agreed to pay for Twitter, Pentwater’s stake would be worth about $980 million. The stock closed up 22% on Tuesday at $52, which is still below the acquisition price, signaling that Wall Street isn’t entirely convinced the deal will close.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said on Tuesday that he’d sent Twitter a letter informing the company of his intent to stick to the terms of the April agreement after previously trying to back out. The two sides were scheduled in court in two weeks, and part of Musk’s latest proposal involved putting an end to the litigation. Twitter has said it received the letter and intends to close the transaction at $54.20, but did not comment on the litigation.
When Pentwater jumped into Twitter, the social media company was in a holding pattern. The stock was languishing as Musk was putting out critical tweets about the company’s bot and spam problem, hinting at a sense of buyer’s remorse. The stock dropped as low as $32.55 on July 11, just after Musk officially tried to terminate the deal.
Pentwater was taking advantage of what the firm saw as a clear arbitrage opportunity. There was a signed contract on the table and a bunch of money to be made as long as the deal reached its logical conclusion.
“In my 23-year career doing this, I’ve never seen an acquirer walk away without any reason,” said Matthew Halbower, Pentwater’s founder, in an interview on Tuesday after Musk’s filing landed with the SEC. “The probability of him being able to walk away was very low.”
Halbower said the only two reasons that Musk would have to tear up the deal would be if there was fraud in Twitter’s financial statements or if there was a material event that changed the value of the company. Neither of those issues were at play, Halbower said.
Greenlight Capital also jumped in during the second quarter, paying an average of $37.24 for the stock. In an investor letter, Greenlight’s David Einhorn said there’s was $17 per share in upside rewards if the deal closed and an equal amount in losses if it collapsed.
“So we are getting 50-50 odds on something that should happen 95%+ of the time,” he wrote.
While Pentwater instantly made Twitter one of its top holdings when it purchased shares in the second quarter, the firm hedged its bet with a hefty investment in puts in case the stock dropped in value. So a portion of the gains from its equity investment will pay for the puts.
Pentwater has made other bets in and around the social media space. The firm is one of the top investors in Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that’s been trying to take former President Donald Trump’s media company public, though the deal is being investigated by the SEC and the company recently missed a key deadline to hold onto $1 billion in funding. Trump’s app, Truth Social, was created after the ex-president was booted from Twitter following the events of Jan. 6.
Halbower said Pentwater has 44 employees, with just seven or so in its office in Naples, Florida. The firm also has locations near Chicago and in New York, Minneapolis and London.
The Naples office had its power restored on Sunday, four days after Hurricane Ian slammed into the west coast of Florida as a Category 4 storm. The office reopened on Monday, Halbower said.
Across the state, roughly 380,000 homes and businesses were without power as of Tuesday afternoon, down from a peak of 2.6 million on Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us. Collier County, which includes Naples, remains one of the counties with the most outages.
Pentwater isn’t the only investor that’s set for a big payday should the Musk deal close.
Longtime shareholder Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 39.95 million shares, worth $2.17 billion at the acquisition price. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, owns 18.04 million shares, valued at close to $1 billion. Among institutions, the only investors with a bigger stake than Pentwater are Vanguard, BlackRock, SSgA and Fidelity.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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