The Skydance warrant: a record date one day wide, and the people who wrote the exclusion buying back in Skydance Corp. (NYSE: SKYD) · Gerald J. Cardinale, director, RedBird Capital Partners
- What he did
- Bought 4,900,000 Skydance warrants at $2.80 on 16 October 2026, about $13.72m, transaction code P, held indirectly through RedBird Capital Partners Management LLC. Form 4 on EDGAR 20 October 2026.
- Why the warrants exist
- After the Warner Bros. Discovery close on 6 October, Skydance paid a warrant dividend: 470,746,773 warrants issued 13 October 2026 under an agreement with Equiniti Trust Company, one per Class B share, to holders of record 5 October 2026. Strike $12.00, cash-settled, expiring 13 October 2036, with early expiry possible after 13 October 2029 if the stock closes at or above $30.00 on 20 of 30 consecutive sessions. Excluded Holders — certain Ellison family members and trusts, RedBird Capital Partners Fund IV and affiliates, company subsidiaries holding Class B, and the Paramount Global 401(k) Plan — received none.
- The comparator
- Laurene Powell Jobs bought 20,833,333 Class B shares at $12.00 — about $250m in cash, through a trust, not a grant — on 6 October, Form 4 filed 8 October, and joined the board as an independent director with 33,118 RSUs vesting by October 2027. The record date was 5 October. She received no warrants. SKYD closed $7.10 on 20 October.
Consensus read
Two separate, unremarkable stories. Cardinale’s purchase is a routine insider confidence signal — a director putting $13.7m of his own house’s money behind a stock that has fallen hard.
And Powell Jobs made a bad bet: in at $12, marked at $7.10, roughly 43% underwater, about $108m down on paper. Headline writers have settled on “Steve Jobs’ widow is already losing money,” and at least one outlet has mislabelled her purchase an equity grant.
Contrarian read
They are one story, and it is about a record date one day wide. The 5 October cutoff drew a line through the cap table: legacy public Class B holders received a free ten-year $12 warrant; the control group wrote itself out; and new money funding at the 6 October close landed on the wrong side of it by a single day.
So “43% underwater” is the wrong comparison. A legacy holder’s 5 October share came bundled with an instrument the market now prices at $2.80. Hers did not. On 20,833,333 shares that is about $58m of structural cost nobody is reporting — separate from, and on top of, the mark-to-market loss.
And the buyer in item 03 is the party that excluded itself. RedBird gave up the free distribution, then paid cash to get the instrument back.
Evidence that discriminates
- Record date 5 October, trade date 6 October. Two filing fields, one day apart. Under the consensus read (“she overpaid”) the dates are irrelevant decoration. Under mine the one-day gap is the mechanism. Nothing else separates the two readings so cleanly, and it is checkable in the 8-K and the Form 4 in under a minute.
- $2.80 is an observed market price, not a model output. Cardinale’s Form 4, code P, 16 October, prices the warrant in an arm’s-length trade. 20,833,333 × $2.80 ≈ $58.3m. No volatility assumption is required to get there.
- The price is the size of the transfer. $2.80 against a $7.10 common and a $12.00 strike is 39% of spot for a deep out-of-the-money ten-year warrant. This is not a token sweetener to the float; it is a large, deliberate transfer of value to legacy holders, which is precisely why the exclusion list was drafted and precisely why landing outside it costs real money.
- The exclusion and the buyer are the same house. RedBird Capital Partners Fund IV is named in the 13 October warrant agreement as an Excluded Holder; Cardinale is RedBird’s founder and a Skydance director. That is text in the document, not an inference. The elegant part, for them, is that a warrant adds economics without touching the Class A/B control arithmetic.
What would falsify me
A filing showing Powell Jobs received warrants anyway, or a subscription agreement that made her whole for the dividend — which would be the ordinary way to handle a buyer who funds the day after a record date, and would kill the $58m claim outright.
A warrant record date on or after 6 October. Warrants trading near zero rather than near $2.80 — one 4.9m-warrant print is a thin basis for a mark, and I would retract the number on a thicker tape at a materially lower price.
Or a pre-existing contractual backstop obliging RedBird to buy warrants, which would make the purchase mechanical rather than elective and drain the signal out of it entirely.
Pattern — what is verified and what is not Verified: Fund IV’s exclusion in the 13 October agreement, and a code-P open-market purchase ten days later. Not verified, and labelled as inference: I could not retrieve a prior Cardinale Form 4 showing an open-market warrant purchase, so “first of its kind for this filer” is an impression, not a finding, and I am not resting anything on it. For Powell Jobs, a $250m cash purchase of a non-voting class through a personal trust, at the same $12 the control family paid, is her largest disclosed public-company position taken in a single day.