Twitter Inc (TWTR)

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Elliott Investment Management Is Said to Buy More Than $200 Million of Twitter Stock
By: TheStreet | May 3, 2021

• Twitter shares had dropped after its first-quarter earnings. A media report says hedge fund Elliott bought big into the messaging platform.

Elliott Investment Management has recently bought more than $200 million of Twitter (TWTR) stock, trying to take advantage of its decline, a media report says.

Shares of the San Francisco social-media messaging platform dropped 15% on Friday alone after its first-quarter earnings report disappointed investors.

Elliott, headed by the hedge-fund titan Paul Singer, continues to buy, knowledgeable sources told Bloomberg. How big a stake Elliott holds in the company is unclear.

Cathie Wood’s ARK investment funds also bought Twitter on Friday -- 1.3 million shares, ARK said.

In the earnings report, Twitter posted better-than-expected first-quarter profit and revenue but fell short on user-growth expectations.

Net income was $68 million, or 16 cents a share, vs. a loss of $8.4 million, or 11 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by FactSet had been expecting earnings of 14 cents a share for the quarter.

Revenue totaled $1.04 billion, up 28% from $808 million in the year-ago period and above analysts’ forecasts of $1 billion.

Twitter’s total number of monetizable daily users grew by 7 million from the fourth quarter to 199 million but fell shy of analysts’ expectations of 200 million.

That shortfall made analysts wary, as did Twitter’s more-moderate sales and earnings growth relative to that of competitors like Facebook (FB) and Alphabet (GOOGL).

Piper Sandler analyst Thomas Champion said his team came away “less enthused” by the results, noting that “a more decisive beat on user growth would have instilled confidence.”

His team affirmed its neutral rating on the stock but cut the one-year price target to $66 from $71.

At last check Twitter shares were 2.2% lower at $54.01.

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