Blodget seals £300m deal
HE WAS famously barred from Wall Street in the wake of the dotcom crash.
Now Henry Blodget, pictured, the multimillionaire ex-banker who has reinvented himself as a media mogul, is in line for a massive payday after selling his latest venture in a £300m deal.
His website Business Insider, which covers financial news and technology in the US and elsewhere, has been taken over by Axel Springer.
It is a consolation prize for the German publishing firm, after it was gazumped in its bid to buy the Financial Times earlier this year.
It is an incredible revival of fortunes for Blodget, who came to personify Wall Street’s dotcom-era bullishness in the late 1990s.
He rose to become one of Merrill Lynch’s most senior technology bankers, but was fired amid a crackdown by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer on the way investment banks were organised.
Blodget became the face of the crash – and faced an investigation by the Securities and Exchanges Commission over whether his research was tainted by access to inside information.
He settled the conflict of interest case with US authorities, paying out $4m and being banned from the industry. In 2007 he founded Business Insider, a financial news website with blog articles and attention-seeking headlines, targeting young professionals.
It has grown to 76m monthly users, and has staff in the UK, Australia, India and parts of Asia.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is an investor through his personal company Bezos Expeditions, will hold around 3pc after the deal is completed.
Although the company does not disclose Bezos’s stake before the deal, it is thought he held up to 16pc, which would mean he collected £38m.
Axel, which owns Germany’s Bild newspaper, will spend £226m to raise its stake from 9pc to 97pc. The deal values the firm at just over £291m. Axel has been trying to expand into the English-speaking world. It tried to buy the Daily Telegraph a decade ago, and last year failed to buy Huffington Post-owner AOL. Over the summer it bid for the Financial Times, but was beaten by Japanese giant Nikkei. Blodget, who will stay with the group as its chief executive and editor-inchief, said: ‘We have tremendous respect for Axel Springer’s commitment to independent journalism and its global vision for the future.’