47 exited campaigns. Here's every one.

We followed Masa Son into Sprint and waited patiently as he carried out his vision of how Sprint would play a key role in the future of the information revolution. It started with the turnaround at Sprint and ultimately led to the successful merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, which became one of the big three in the wireless industry. All along this path, we were looking for a big revaluation opportunity in the stock. And we got it. The campaign required patience — FCC approval, DOJ approval, and a state attorneys general lawsuit — all cleared. We exited for another big winner in our Billionaire's Portfolio.

We entered Cliffs following the lead of one of the great 80s corporate raiders, Donald Drapkin. Cliffs was suffering from a steep plunge in iron ore prices, compounded by bad decision-making by management. Goncalves, after cutting his teeth in the steel business in Brazil and successfully running steel companies in North America, was watching Cliffs from afar and had a plan to reinvent the company. He took that plan to Drapkin, who had built a large controlling stake. Through a multi-month proxy fight, they shook up the board and installed Goncalves as Chairman and CEO. Tragically, Drapkin died in a skiing accident in 2016. But Goncalves continued to execute — transforming Cliffs into the biggest supplier of steel in North America. A vertically integrated company, from iron ore production to finished steel products. Arguably one of the most transparent, shareholder-aligned CEOs in the public markets.

When we added Sarepta, it was an unknown stock. We followed the biotech specialist hedge fund Perceptive Advisors into a company with the only drug on the table for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy — a devastating, terminal disease with no treatment. Joseph Edelman, the founder of Perceptive, had held the stock since 2014 and endured all of the swings, from mid-teens to the mid-30s, for a couple of round trips. Still, he stood strong with his conviction that this FDA decision was too politically unpalatable to reject and was a low risk/high reward approval. We were risking roughly 50% downside for 5x upside. The FDA approved. On the day of approval, Sarepta was the biggest mover in the entire stock market. A great example of the power of following a big influential investor with very specific expertise in picking winners in the biotech space.

We added UAL at the depths of the market decline surrounding the health care crisis and economic lockdown. With cash on hand, we scooped up UAL at about 20 cents on the dollar from where it was trading three months prior. The stock market is the only place where people run out of the store when everything goes on sale. The billionaire investors we follow created their wealth doing the exact opposite — buying when others are selling. Airlines were an industry disproportionately impacted by the crisis. But we knew the administration committed to backstopping the airlines. They told us what they would do. We listened. UAL was the biggest position in Paul Reeder's fund, PAR Capital Management — a former airline analyst who had nearly a quarter of his $5 billion fund in the stock. We followed the government money into a beaten-down airline, and took our profit at +159% in under a year.

We followed one of our favorite activist investors into this stock: Starboard Value. They have one of the best win rates in the business, winning on better than 80% of their activist campaigns. Smith penned a letter to Brink's management early on and made a detailed presentation, scrutinizing the underperformance of management and laying out a very clear game plan for unlocking value. He told us he thought the stock could be worth between $45 and $73 if Brink's got its margins in line with its peers — namely Loomis. Starboard won three board seats. They replaced the CEO. They fought relentlessly to change the culture and get margins in line with the competition. The company's sequential improvements showed up in every quarterly report — and in the stock price. Starboard held as much as 12.5% at one point, and when they began scaling out below 5%, we took that as our exit signal. We sold it at right around $52 — for a 76% winner in ten months.

Our billionaire investor involved in Howmet is Paul Singer of Elliott Management. Singer originally invested in Alcoa. The Alcoa split resulted in a company named Arconic. In the higher-growth Arconic business, Singer ousted the CEO and was executing on his gameplan to unlock value when they were hit with a near-fatal legal blow — the construction materials business at Arconic was implicated in a deadly residential apartment fire in London. Singer and his team worked through a variety of solutions, including a possible sale to private equity, before settling on installing his own guys to run the company and executing yet another spinoff — separating the aerospace engineered products business from the construction and aluminum products business. Howmet has been a clear example of how our billionaire investors can control their own destiny — they can manufacture results. Singer fought through challenges, pivoted when necessary, and found solutions to unlock value.

We followed Carl Icahn's protégé and top activist investor, Keith Meister of Corvex Capital, into his YUM Brands campaign. Meister — a former Harvard football player and Icahn's right-hand man — took a controlling stake of more than $1.5 billion in YUM early 2015 and immediately began pushing to spin off YUM's Chinese business. He secured a board seat and laid out a specific gameplan: move YUM Brands away from company-owned restaurants and toward its high-margin franchising business, and rapidly expand store count in China. He got the spinoff in November 2016. We entered in April 2017 — after Meister had wielded his influence on the board, after he'd gotten his spinoff, and after the two companies were beginning to execute on the post-spin gameplan. We treated YUM and YUMC as one campaign, weighted 2/3 YUM and 1/3 YUMC. YUM was executing — 93% franchise-owned restaurants, marching toward 98%. YUM China was adding 550-600 new stores per year. Meister thought the combined value could reach $60 billion, up from $35 billion. He quietly exited over the summer, and both stocks hit record highs. Combining the two stakes, we exited up close to 25% in just six months.

We thought perhaps that having Carl Icahn on our side, as the largest shareholder owning nearly 40% of the company, would give us a chance. Then Covid-19 caused an extremely rapid and substantial decrease in travel. Hertz encountered major financial difficulties and filed for bankruptcy. The probability of coming out intact as shareholders became zero when Icahn disclosed that he had sold his entire stake at 72 cents — a once $1.6 billion investment. Icahn's statement: "I have been an investor and supporter of Hertz since 2014. Unfortunately because of Covid-19 I sold my equity position at a significant loss." When we hold a portfolio of stocks with asymmetric risk/return profiles, we know the downside is defined. But the upside potential is multiples, which can more than pay for these situations that don't work out. This is how the billionaire investors we follow approach their investments.

When Smith stepped in, buying stock in the $80s, it was the biggest position in the history of Starboard's fund. An entrenched leadership team and board had just spent over $100 million fighting off a bid from Mylan that would have paid shareholders $205 a share. They fought it off successfully — and shareholders watched 80% of that value evaporate. Smith forced out the old regime through a board refresh, took a seat himself along with four Starboard-nominated independent directors, and pushed through two CEO changes. The plan was to separate the prescription drug business from the market-leading consumer healthcare business. As a standalone, the consumer healthcare business had the potential for a re-rating that could deliver multiples of upside on our initial investment. Everything was going according to plan — until the new CEO walked it back in an earnings call, saying the timing wasn't right and the transformation would be "years." Starboard quietly filed a 13D amendment disclosing a large sale, cutting a third of their position below 5% ownership. Smith resigned his board seat. They invested the proceeds into a bigger Symantec stake. We followed Starboard's lead and exited.