While Anne Wojcicki isn’t the most honest woman in town, she may be the most driven. After a wild year of batsh*t craziness with 23andMe going under, heading towards an auction acquisition with Regneron… Wojcicki rolled up, grabbed the mic, and declared, “I object… now give me back my sh*t” LOL. In short, Regeneron was halfway through measuring the office for new furniture when Anne’s nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, crashed the bankruptcy auction with a $305 million bid… blowing Regeneron’s $256 million offer out of the water and reclaiming 23andMe for the original DNA queen herself.

(Source: Giphy) 

Which is just absolutely wild, if I do say so myself… especially when you look back and consider the path that led to this. If you recall, 23andMe has spent the majority of its time pretending it could be the Apple of spit tubes. This was a company that SPAC’d its way to a $6 billion peak valuation in 2021, convinced investors that recurring revenue would materialize if they just squinted at the business model hard enough, and then face planted straight into Chapter 11 bankruptcy this March. 

Turns out, selling ancestry results to people who already know they’re vaguely Irish isn’t a path to infinite riches… especially when you can’t keep hackers from making off with seven million customers’ genetic secrets. But then Regeneron entered the picture, and tried to scoop up the wreckage for $256 million, presumably to bolt 23andMe’s database onto its own pharma R&D machine. But Anne Wojcicki… who let me remind you, stepped down as CEO the second the bankruptcy papers hit the table, would rather be guillotined than to let her “Elizabeth Holmes” like creation end up as another company’s science fair project.

(Source: Wall Street Journal) 

So she whipped up TTAM and dropped a $305 million offer to buy back basically everything: the Personal Genome Service, the research biz, and even Lemonaid Health, their telehealth side hustle. Bigly. As for the financials here, it’s chaos math. At $305 million, Wojcicki is paying about 5% of what the company was valued at during the SPAC mania. Investors who bought at the top are now holding the world’s worst falling knife. Regeneron, on the other hand, gets to walk away without inheriting any of the post-hack regulatory migraines or the existential dread of trying to monetize direct-to-consumer genomics in a world that’s suddenly privacy-obsessed.

However, with that said, while this is Wojcicki’s monumental win, it’s not official until the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Missouri signs off. But unless the judge is still salty for God knows what reason… or he isn’t bribed the other way, this is as close to a done deal as it gets. Meaning, the queen of spit gets her DNA empire back… and she paid $305 million to keep the house. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Of course, 23andMe is now an over-the-counter stock sitting at $5.49, but hey, shares did see a massive 6.60% boom after the news. So I guess there is still hope in this story… maybe. We’ll see. Don’t hold your breath and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Apple as mentioned in the article.