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(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.
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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