Could it be worth it to buy 23andme stocks if you want some of their user’s data?
Naively, the sticker price of 75M USD (today’s market cap) for all of their user data might seem cheap—all together for genomes of roughly 12 million users. It seems reasonably cheap to me on a replacement cost and opportunity-cost basis.
However, the 49% basically-majority shareholder is CEO Anne Wojcicki and a “possibility is that Wojcicki has unreasonable plans to take the company private at a bargain-basement price[1]”. If you takes this path forward as a decidedly important but minority shareholder, the only clear way forward is to hope for a shareholder oppression lawsuit in your favour. And instead of cashing out, you hope you can turn your skill set of “being annoying enough” into data in-lieu of cash (Note: if this is done through bankruptcy process, I can’t see the trustee agreeing to this plan.)
Even given the obstacles, is this a deal? Or is this just a bad price for this particular bag of information? Is 23andme’s information sufficiently low fidelity that it might not be useful at all except to relate yourself to fractional vikings?
Could it be worth it to buy 23andme stocks if you want some of their user’s data?
Naively, the sticker price of 75M USD (today’s market cap) for all of their user data might seem cheap—all together for genomes of roughly 12 million users. It seems reasonably cheap to me on a replacement cost and opportunity-cost basis.
However, the 49% basically-majority shareholder is CEO Anne Wojcicki and a “possibility is that Wojcicki has unreasonable plans to take the company private at a bargain-basement price[1]”. If you takes this path forward as a decidedly important but minority shareholder, the only clear way forward is to hope for a shareholder oppression lawsuit in your favour. And instead of cashing out, you hope you can turn your skill set of “being annoying enough” into data in-lieu of cash (Note: if this is done through bankruptcy process, I can’t see the trustee agreeing to this plan.)
Even given the obstacles, is this a deal? Or is this just a bad price for this particular bag of information? Is 23andme’s information sufficiently low fidelity that it might not be useful at all except to relate yourself to fractional vikings?
Per Matt Levine—Money Stuff, Sep 19, 2024