Australian hedge fund takes aim at Apple after major court ruling
Minotaur Capital is shorting the tech giant — and backing developers — as a legal defeat threatens one of Apple’s crown jewels.
When Thomas Rice saw that Apple had been found to have violated its court orders last week, the Sydney-based fund manager swiftly took a short position against the US tech giant.
The co-founder of AI-powered hedge fund Minotaur Capital predicts that Apple’s legal loss — which will restrict how it manages its App Store business and threaten its high-margin revenue stream — will have major implications across the market.
“It's one of the harshest judgments I've seen against a company like Apple,” Rice told Capital Brief.
In “direct defiance” of a 2021 injunction, the Northern California court found the company had introduced a series of anticompetitive measures to “maintain a revenue stream worth billions.” These included the introduction of a new 27% fee for off-app purchases and barriers to prevent developers and customers dealing directly — both of which the ruling now prohibits.
