Pinterest stock declines on reports activist investor Elliott to push for sale
Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss news that activist investor Elliott Management may push Pinterest to sell.
Video transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
BRAD SMITH: Everyone, Let's take a look at a trending ticker right now. Take a look at shares of PINS, pins, pins, pins, down 4% right now after reports from deal reporters saying the company's largest investor, Elliott Investment, may push for a sale.
Elliott's involvement with Pinterest was reported back in July by "The Wall Street Journal," which said, at the time, that the firm had built a stake of over 9% in the company here, Julie. This has been really interesting to track in terms of what Elliott's ultimate goals were with that stake that they had built up in Pinterest.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, what's interesting is that the stock is not going up, right? We had a little bit of a spike earlier in the session when this first started percolating out there. This was reported by Deal Reporter, which is behind a paywall. So then it sort of trickles through, right? The system and the chatter among traders.
But you would think, if Elliott's pushing for sale that Pinterest would be higher. So the fact that it's not maybe throws a little bit of skepticism into the equation or-- and/or questions about if they were going to sell themselves, who would buy them?
BRAD SMITH: It is. And it's a question of as well, what category, still, Pinterest wants to play in. It's not clear the company was trying to step away from being annexed to the other social media companies, at the time when it went public.
It's still tried to be and largely has been, kind of this inspirational platform for finding out new things that you might be interested in and whether that's DIY projects, or whether that's just finding new recipes, or just finding inspiration for everything from your next outfit that you want to wear, all the way to the way to kind of propagate a new plant.
And so all of that has now gone increasingly to some of the other social media platforms that Pinterest didn't want to be annexed to. So it's a larger question of, for whoever would be that acquisitive company, the company that would come in, and swoop in, and ultimately kind of put them under their umbrella, what vision they have for growing up Pinterest and that average revenue per user on the platform, too.
JULIE HYMAN: Right, lots of good questions about all of this. And like, or would it be someone in ecommerce, who could link up and monetize all of those different? I mean, they've done some of that already, right?
BRAD SMITH: Yeah.
JULIE HYMAN: A lot of the Pinterest stuff has links. But I don't-- I don't know.
BRAD SMITH: We'll have to continue to watch shares--
JULIE HYMAN: Watch this space.
BRAD SMITH: --as we move on throughout the-- throughout the day, yeah.
