Rohan’s view
Activists are a little lost. The end of near zero-interest rates and the wacky dislocation of AI has scuttled the impact of tried-and-true activist plays like levered buybacks and cost-cutting campaigns.
But this AI era is actually the perfect time for the right breed of activists: those with real plans on how to tear up business models and remake them for this particular moment of upheaval. The low-hanging fruit is gone.
Take SaaS companies: a whole crop of companies like Adobe and Salesforce trying to protect against a wave of vibe-coding startups eating their lunch. It’s the perfect time for an outsider to come in with a better way. And there’s precedent here: activist ValueAct pushed Adobe in 2011 to move from a license-based model to that SaaS model, a shift that led to a 2,220% rise in shares over 10 years.
There’s also a group of unsexy companies that are flying under the radar as everyone else focuses on AI: Chemicals, industrials, real estate, even forestry. They offer a chance for a back-to-basics approach targeting companies with finite assets that are underutilized, underperforming, or underappreciated. Dislocation from tariffs, onshoring, war, oil, and supply shocks present opportunities for dissident shareholders to show laggards the way.
The lessons aren’t all that different from the great breadstick campaign of 2014, when Starboard’s Jeff Smith’s play at Olive Garden parent Darden literally ripped the company for undersalting its pasta water in an effort to save money on pots and pans. The company was saving a few bucks but ruining its product. (That campaign — and presentation — remains required reading for baby bankers and lawyers.)
It would be a breath of fresh air for investors and the reporters covering the space. Activist plays have become a lot more boring lately — as Liz Hoffman and I joke, most of them can now be distilled down to “we’d like the stock price to go up, please.” Getting there also got boring — cut staff, pull back on advertising, maybe spin off a business or lever up and give the money to shareholders. They certainly seem busier than ever — Lazard data shows a 20% year-over-year jump in activity — but other than Elliott’s push at BP, they’ve been unusually quiet.
There’s some hope, as we reported last week: Oasis’ plan to mount a proxy fight at Vail Resorts, which is essentially a REIT play that unlocks the value of a finite asset (mountains!), pushes for a dramatic business-model shift (sell those mountains), and gets someone to run the rest of the business more efficiently. As other investors zig towards AI, the smart activists will zag down the mountain.
Notable
- One semi-activist investor, Brad Gerstner, urged Mark Zuckerberg to get Meta “fit” three years ago, cutting headcount, focus on AI spending, and pull back on the metaverse. Zuckerberg largely listened to Gerstner (except on capping capex!).