Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesDavid Einhorn, the hedge fund manager, and his wife, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, at the Time 100 gala.When Apple agreed to extensively expand its stock buyback program last month, David Einhorn was pleased.
So pleased, in fact, that he has increased his stake in the iPad maker.
During an earnings call for another company that his hedge fund owns, Mr. Einhorn said that his firm, Greenlight Capital, raised the size of its Apple holdings. The hedge fund owned about 1.3 million shares as of Dec. 31, making it Apple’s 75th-largest investor.
Last month, Apple announced that it would quintuple the size of its share buybacks, to $60 billion, and would increase its dividend by 15 percent. The moves came after Mr. Einhorn publicly pushed Apple to pay out some of its enormous war chest — now totaling some $145 billion — to shareholders.
Here’s what Mr. Einhorn said on Tuesday:
Apple took a major step forward by issuing debt and announcing it will return $100 billion to shareholders over the next three years. This is a vastly more shareholder-friendly capital allocation policy then where Apple stood a few months ago. We have added to our Apple position. Now we just wait for the release of Apple’s next blockbuster product.