(Bloomberg) — Newsmax Inc.’s (NMAX) debut as a public company has given founder and Chief Executive Officer Christopher Ruddy a fortune of about $3.3 billion after its shares surged 735%.
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The conservative cable news network sold $75 million of shares at $10 each in Monday’s initial public offering. The stock closed at $83.51 after repeated trading pauses due to volatility.
Ruddy’s 39.2 million class A shares, owned through a revocable trust, have 10 votes each, giving him control of 81% of the company’s votes. He didn’t sell any shares in the New York Stock Exchange offering.
Ruddy, 60, declined to comment.
At close: March 31 at 4:00:39 PM EDT
Other investors include Interactive Brokers Group Inc. founder Thomas Peterffy, who owns 23 million shares worth $1.9 billion through Conyers Investments LLC; Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, a Qatari royal whose investment firm, Heritage Advisors, owns 19.7 million shares; and Vadim Shulman, a Ukrainian industrialist.
Newsmax’s share price gives the company a market value of more than $10.7 billion. The Boca Raton, Florida-based firm lost $72 million last year on revenue of about $171 million. Fox Corp., which is worth almost $25 billion and operates competing network Fox News, reported net income of $2.4 billion on $6.5 billion of revenue in the same period.
Rupert Murdoch, who is chairman emeritus of Fox Corp., is worth $15.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Ruddy founded Newsmax in 1998 as a conservative news website after previously working as a journalist at the New York Post and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The company launched a cable news channel in 2014.
The son of a police officer, Ruddy grew up on Long Island, New York. After studying history at St. John’s University, he earned a master’s degree in public policy from the London School of Economics.
He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, although Newsmax also makes a corporate apartment in New York available to him.
—With assistance from Bailey Lipschultz.
(Updates with Ruddy declining to comment in paragraph four)
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