Who is PSTH taking public?

On Wednesday night, U.S. investor Bill Ackman revealed that his ‘super-SPAC’, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings Ltd (NYSE: PSTH) was merely weeks away from closing a merger. Investors leaped on the stock following the ambiguous announcement. 

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Since going public last year, speculation surrounding what company the billionaire would be merging with via his special purpose acquisition firm (SPAC), and now, he has confirmed that the wait could soon be over.  

What is PSTH?

In case you’re not familiar, PSTH is a SPAC, a company that has been created with zero commercial operations in mind. Its aim is to raise capital through an IPO that can then be used to acquire a company that already exists in what is called a reverse-merger. 

It is headed by Bill Ackman, an American investor and hedge fund manager, who brought the company public in September 2020 at $20 per share. Since then, its stock has risen more than 20% despite no official confirmation of who the company intends to merge with. 

So, what company is PSTH merging with?

We don’t know yet. Ackman has remained mute on the details. According to Ackman:

“We’ve been working on a transaction since early November. Lot of complexity. We’re either going to get a transaction done…in the relative short term, weeks, or we’re we’ll be on to the next one.”

The company has been widely followed on Reddit, where two major contenders are emerging as potential Ackman targets for the deal:

• Stripe — A financial services and software as a service company headquartered in San Francisco. 
• Bloomberg LP —  A financial, software, data, and media company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. 

The latter seems more likely, considering that Ackman actually met with Michael Bloomberg back in October regarding a discussion to take a minority stake in Bloomberg’s media conglomerate. However, this is not proof of any deal. 

The reality is that we don’t know which company PSTH will merge with yet. It’s entirely possible that Ackman himself isn’t quite sure either, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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