The league announced the completion of the purchase Tuesday during its spring meeting in Atlanta. It was the first order of business after Tepper was approved by the owners’ finance committee during a morning session.
Tepper is paying an NFL-record price to buy the team from Jerry Richardson, the team’s founder and only owner since the Panthers entered the league in 1995.
Tepper is the founder and president of global hedge fund Appaloosa Management, with a reported net worth of $11 billion. Already familiar to the league as a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, his purchase was quickly approved.
Tepper said he plans to formally take over the team in July.
In the meantime, he reserved judgment on both a new stadium and those who are running the football side of things, most notably general manager Marty Hurney and coach Ron Rivera.
“The first thing I care about is winning. The second thing I care about is winning. And the third thing I care about is?” he said, waiting for the media to give the obvious answer. “That’s on and off the field. That includes charity aspect, community aspect and how you make a community better. So you win a lot of ways, and I don’t like losing in any way.”
MORE ON DAVID TEPPER, NEW NFL FRANCHISE OWNER
David Alan Tepper (born September 11, 1957) is an American billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, NFL team owner and philanthropist. He is the founder and president of Appaloosa Management, a global hedge fund based in Miami Beach, Florida.
He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He earned an MBA (then known as an MSIA) from Carnegie Mellon in 1982. In 2013, he donated his largest gift of $67 million to Carnegie Mellon University, whose Tepper School of Business is named after him.
After earning his MBA in 1982, Tepper accepted a position in the treasury department of Republic Steel in Ohio.
In 1984, he was recruited to Keystone Mutual Funds (now part of Evergreen Funds) in Boston, and in 1985, Tepper was recruited by Goldman Sachs, which was forming its high yield group. He joined the firm in New York City as a credit analyst. Within six months, Tepper became the head trader on the high-yield desk at Goldman where he worked for eight years. His primary focus was bankruptcies and special situations. He left Goldman in December 1992 and started Appaloosa Management in early 1993.
In 2001, he generated a 61% return by focusing on distressed bonds, and in the fourth quarter of 2005 he pursued what he saw as better opportunities in Standard & Poor’s 500 stocks. He makes significant gains year after year by “investing in the diciest of companies,” such as MCI and Mirant. Investments in Conseco and Marconi also led to huge profits for the company’s hedge funds while Tepper “keeps the market on edge.”
In 2014, and in 2017 Forbes listed Tepper as one of the 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers in 2013 and 2016 respectively.
Appaloosa Management’s investments focus on undiversified concentrated investment positions. Appaloosa invests in the global public equity and fixed incomemarkets with a focus on “equities and debt of distressed companies, bonds, exchange warrants, options, futures, notes, and junk bonds.” According to BusinessWeek, the firm’s client base consists of high-net-worth individuals, pension and profit sharing plans, corporations, foreign governments, foundations, universities, and other organizations.” Investors commit to a locked period of three years during which their withdrawals are limited to 25 percent of their total investment.
