Billionaires: Google co-founder Sergey Brin opens family office in Singapore

In our fortnightly roundup, Mr Brin is the latest tycoon to take advantage of the city-state’s low taxes and generous incentives, while billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban predicts a second round of shorting in GameStop shares

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - DECEMBER 03: Alphabet president Sergey Brin attends the 2018 Breakthrough Prize at NASA Ames Research Center on December 3, 2017 in Mountain View, California. Kelly Sullivan/Getty Show more

Sergey Brin

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has opened a family office in Singapore to help manage his fortune, making him the latest tycoon to establish a private investment company in the financial hub.

The company overseeing the assets of Mr Brin, the world’s ninth-richest person with a fortune of $86.5 billion, set up its Singapore branch late last year, according to documents filed with the corporate regulator.

The ultra-wealthy have increasingly chosen the city-state in recent years to open so-called “family offices” focused on handling their fortunes and lives, among them British billionaire inventor James Dyson.

They are attracted by the city-state’s low tax rates, political stability and incentives such as a scheme giving investors a pathway to permanent residency.

The city-state of 5.7 million, which has a large expatriate population, is home to about 200 single-family offices overseeing assets worth some $20bn, according to the government.

According to documents filed with the regulator, the Singapore office of Mr Brin’s US-based Bayshore Global Management will mainly focus on managing family investments.

The office of Mr Brin, 47, is named after North Bayshore, the area of Mountain View, California, where Google has its headquarters.

Mr Brin and Larry Page co-founded the internet search engine – now a unit of parent company Alphabet – in 1998. They stepped down from their roles at the helm of Alphabet in 2019.

Google has its Asian headquarters in Singapore.

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban joined Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum for an “Ask Me Anything” session last week and, true to form, he didn’t hold back.

The billionaire has been among a group of prominent financial heavyweights, including Chamath Palihapitiya and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, to align with retail traders in what they see as a battle between Main Street and Wall Street.

During the chat, Mr Cuban encouraged the forum to hold on to their GameStop shares if they could afford it, and predicted that institutional funds would jump back in for a second round of shorting the video-game retailer. The serial entrepreneur said GameStop holders should take a lesson from Bitcoin investors, who held on to the cryptocurrency when its price plummeted in 2017.

“I have no doubt that there are funds and big players that have shorted this stock again thinking they are smarter than everyone on WSB,” said Mr Cuban, who doesn’t own the stock. “I know you are going to hate to hear this, but the lower it goes, the more powerful WSB can be stepping up to buy the stock again.”

He also took shots at Robinhood Markets for, in his words, failing its users. “There was only one thing that messed you all up: Robinhood and the other zero-commission brokers that everyone used didn’t have enough capital to fund the fight,” he wrote. “They let you down in a big way.”

Robinhood clients are currently only allowed to purchase restricted amounts of shares in certain securities. Users are limited to buying 100 shares of GameStop and 1,250 shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings, for example.

But it wasn’t just Robinhood that attracted Mr Cuban’s ire. He attacked the US Securities and Exchange Commission for not caring about ordinary investors, saying he “wouldn’t trust them to do the right thing ever”.

Mr Cuban also spoke about this own experience of being the target of short sellers. Back when his company, Broadcast.com, was public, he said he encouraged people to short the stock if they didn’t believe in it. Now, he said, he loves to see the companies he owns being shorted.

“If it’s a company I want to own, I know the shorts can be squeezed and if the company does really, really well, then the shorts will have to cover, creating more demand for the stock of the company I own, pushing the stock price up,” Mr Cuban wrote.

Mr Cuban, who’s worth $4.9bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, told WallStreetBets’ members to keep sticking it to the establishment and to find a better broker for the next time.

“Thanks for changing the game. Thanks for taking on Wall Street,” Mr Cuban wrote, urging them to find “a broker with trillions of dollars in assets on their balance sheet. Someone that can be there when the fight starts and won’t blink an eye”.

Steven Cohen

Billionaire investor Steven Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management has opened to new cash and raised more than $1.5bn in commitments, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Point72 is raising the money because it sees investment opportunities in the market, the report said.

The move comes after Point72 gave Melvin Capital, a fund that held a large short position in GameStop, a capital infusion of $750 million that enabled it to close out that position with a large loss.

Point72 has suffered a nearly 15 per cent loss this year due to the sudden surge in shares of GameStop, the New York Times reported.

Richard Branson

Richard Branson is expected to fly into space this year, but his fortune has already hit the stratosphere.

The billionaire has added about $2bn to his wealth since the start of January as shares in Virgin Galactic Holdings have surged to a peak after a succession of positive events.

First there was Cathie Wood’s plan for an exchange-traded fund tracking space-focused companies. Then Virgin Galactic was drawn into the Reddit-fuelled frenzy of retail investors pouring into shorted stocks. And finally, the news last week that the venture would resume test flights of its rocket-powered spaceplane. The stock has already more than doubled this year.

Mr Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic Airways had to be rescued from the brink of collapse last year, now has a record net worth of $7.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His stake in Virgin Galactic makes up almost half of his fortune.

Space tourism is one of the latest bets by Mr Branson, 70, a serial creator of companies ranging from record labels to soft drinks. The Virgin brand he founded as a mail-order retailer in 1970 is now linked to more than 40 businesses worldwide, including British bank Virgin Money UK.