Saba Capital boss Boaz Weinstein has attacked Baillie Gifford for reducing the positions held in SpaceX by Edinburgh Worldwide (EWI) and Baillie Gifford US Growth (USA) investment trusts.
Tweeting on X, Weinstein said he had received calls from “furious” shareholders in both trusts, where Saba holds around 30%, amid reports that Elon Musk’s rocket company is preparing for a $1.5trn flotation.
Weinstein claimed that the trusts cut their SpaceX holdings by about a third in preparation for their proposed merger, which the activist hedge fund blocked last week.
He said the sales of the unquoted SpaceX would have been at a “massively lower” valuation, adding: “Baillie put their interests ahead of their clients yet again. They calculated they need to sell to keep the private holdings percentage from going up in their ill-fated EWI/USA merger.”
Baillie Gifford declined to comment when QuotedData contacted the company yesterday but later told Citywire the sales were made at a fair value.
“Whilst we are aware of continued positive news flow around SpaceX, only confirmed transactional activity will feed into our fair value assessment. Press speculation is not one of the inputs in our valuation process,” the funds group said.
Earlier in the week Musk dismissed the reports about SpaceX as “inaccurate”.
SpaceX remains the top holding in both trusts, at 6% of US Growth and 8.5% of Edinburgh Worldwide, but these are down from 11.2% and 14.2% in May and April, according to trust results and Baillie Gifford documents.
The dispute over SpaceX is the latest clash between the activist hedge fund and Baillie Gifford and the two trusts. Saba has requisitioned a general meeting of shareholders to replace EWI’s six-strong board with three nominees of its own, lambasting its poor performance over three and five years but ignoring its recovery in the past year.
This promises a re-run of the general meeting in February when Saba first tried to gain control of the £721m trust’s board but was overwhelmingly rejected by shareholders.
It alarmed the board of Baillie Gifford US Growth in October when without warning it used its 29% stake to vote against the re-election of its board but was defeated by a narrow margin.
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James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, said: “Some commentators have suggested that, for Saba, the attraction of EWI and USA is their stakes in SpaceX. This tweet seems to reinforce that idea.”
