Appaloosa Management bailed on AAPL in Q1, sold 4.5 million shares

By Stephen Silver

David Tepper's fund sold its entire Apple stake in the first quarter, worth up to $833 million.

According to the New York Post on Wednesday, Tepper's fund Appaloosa Management, sold all its Apple shares during the first quarter. It's not clear exactly in the quarter when the shares were sold. According to Thomson Reuters, Appaloosa owned 4,587,852 shares of Apple stock. Based on fluctuations of share price during the quarter, the value of the stake was somewhere within a range of $711.8 million and $833.6 million.

Had Appaloosa Management sold when Apple hit its all-time high of $190.37 on May 11, the stake would have been worth $873.3 million.

Appaloosa had sold its entire Apple stake in 2016, around the time that Carl Icahn did the same, only to return in the interim. The company then had trimmed the Apple stake again in late 2017, due to worries about "China policy," Tepper told CNBC in March, before dropping the rest for as-yet unknown reasons in early 2018.

The news comes on the same day that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway officially became Apple's third-largest shareholder.

Ready for some football

The news comes as Tepper is in the news for unrelated reasons. on Wednesday, the NFL announced that Tepper is buying the Carolina Panthers franchise for $2.275 billion, the largest amount ever paid for an NFL team. The deal remains subject to approval by NFL owners.

According to an NFL.com story, the 60-year-old Tepper has an estimated net worth of $11 billion, which made him the wealthiest man in the state of New Jersey before he moved to Florida. He started Appaloosa Management in 1993 after he was passed over for partnership at Goldman Sachs.

Tepper later purchased a $43.5 million Hamptons home formerly owned by the executive who passed him over, razed it, and built a new one twice its size. Tepper also claims to have popularized the phrase "it is what it is."