Baseballs aren’t the only round things fancied by Steve Cohen. According to Sportico, the owner of the New York Mets recently picked up a 5.5% stake in the Las Vegas Sphere.
Cohen bought 1.56 million shares of Sphere Entertainment, which includes the spherical concert venue built for $2.3 billion by majority owner James Dolan, and opened last September.
The new investment came to light via a Schedule 13G filing, which is required for investment firms with an ownership stake in a company’s total stock exceeding 5%. Though the filing didn’t include Cohen’s purchase price, 1.56 million shares of Sphere Entertainment today is worth approximately $52 million.
Sphere Phishing
Cohen purchased the stock sometime in this year’s second quarter through his Point72 Asset Management hedge fund. It was the second time the Cohen-founded group invested in the Sphere. Last year, Point72 owned 262,102 shares, but sold them in the first quarter of 2024.
The tremendous infusion of Cohen cash comes at an urgently needed time. Dolan is reportedly negotiating for Sphere residencies with the most expensive acts in the music business — including Beyonce, Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, and the Eagles, who just announced a 12-date residency this fall.
The Eagles will play only the Sphere’s third residency, following 24 shows by Dead & Company and 40 by U2.
It’s widely believed that the unprecedented offer made to U2 to serve as the Sphere’s guinea pigs — a reported 90% of ticket sales plus $10M to finance a dedicated video production — hurt the Sphere’s bottom line, not only at the time, but to this day because other A-listers feel deserving of identical terms.
Luckily for the Sphere, the bulk of its revenue derives from movie screenings, not concert performances. The Darren Aronofsky sci-fi opus “Postcards from Earth” reportedly grossed more than $1 million in average daily ticket sales, producing $100.5 million in revenue for 257 performances during the most recent quarter.
Two more Sphere films are reportedly in production. One will be a documentary about U2, the other a new spin on “The Wizard of Oz.”
Dolan and his family still own a controlling stake (6.9 million) in Sphere Entertainment. However, Cohen isn’t known for purchasing minor stakes in entities he’s not thinking of eventually controlling.
He first bought into the Mets via an 8% stake in 2012, for $40 million, and then purchased 89% more of the team in 2020, for $2.4 billion — one of the largest transactions in the history of professional sports.
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