Porsche secretly acquired a massive stake in the much larger Volkswagen group in 2008, using hidden financial derivatives to control over seventy percent of the company's shares.

A closer look

Porsche secretly acquired a massive stake in the much larger Volkswagen group in 2008, using hidden financial derivatives to control over seventy percent of the company's shares. When Porsche finally announced their holdings, hedge funds that had heavily shorted Volkswagen suddenly panicked because there were literally not enough free shares left on the market to cover their losing bets. The resulting buying frenzy temporarily made Volkswagen the most valuable company on the entire planet, causing billions of dollars in losses for elite Wall Street speculators in a matter of hours. The fact that a niche luxury sports car manufacturer managed to casually bankrupt a bunch of sophisticated hedge funds using a legally questionable stealth buyout is the kind of aggressive corporate trolling that usually only exists in movie scripts. Nobody shed a single tear for the hedge funds