- Bill Hwang donated Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook shares to his private foundation.
- The Archegos chief’s Grace and Mercy Foundation cashed them in for $325 million.
- Grace and Mercy could have sold the shares for nearly $950 million today.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Bill Hwang, the investor who lost $20 billion in two days when his family office imploded in March, donated technology stocks to his private foundation that would be worth almost $950 million today.
The Archegos Capital Management boss – whose portfolio was swiftly dismantled when his leveraged stock bets soured and he defaulted on his lenders’ margin calls – is the cofounder of the Grace and Mercy Foundation, a Christian charity that helps the poor and oppressed.
Grace and Mercy’s tax filings, reviewed by Insider on ProPublica, show Hwang donated around 121,000 Amazon shares, 945,000 Netflix shares, and 51,000 Facebook shares to the foundation over the past decade. Grace and Mercy sold those shares for about $325 million in total between 2017 and 2018, scoring a handsome $186 million gain.
However, if the foundation had kept the gifts instead of selling them, they would fetch around $946 million today, reflecting the three stocks’ price gains in recent years.
Grace and Mercy also bought shares in Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Expedia, and other companies, its tax filings show. It cashed them in for a total of $200 million between 2014 and 2016, notching a $103 million gain.
Those shares would be worth $722 million today, including Amazon stock worth $449 million and Netflix shares worth $219 million.
Grace and Mercy, which boasted nearly $500 million in assets at the end of 2018, may have cashed in Hwang’s stock gifts because it needed to finance grants to charities and fund its operations. But it undoubtedly left money on the table by selling them.
Hwang is one of several “tiger cubs” who left billionaire investor Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management to start their own funds. He shut down Tiger Asia Management in 2012 after pleading guilty to insider trading in federal court, and launched Archegos in 2013.