THE Steinberg family has dumped more than two million shares in their struggling Individual Investor, Inc., in the past few weeks, selling off at a tremendous loss. And in a bid to juice up newsstand sales, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Steinberg put his wife, CNBC’s Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo, on the cover.
Buying high and selling II stock near its all-time low is all part of a plan, said Steinberg, but he insisted the plan was not to lose money. Rather, he said, he needed to “offset some gains” that the family made elsewhere. Hmmm.
That sounds kind of odd, since Jonathan’s grandmother is suing her own son, Saul — Jonathan’s dad — for money that she says she loaned to Saul that has not been repaid.
On Dec. 18, Jonathan and Saul dumped 1,781,000 million shares of their jointly owned Individual Investor stock by selling it back to the company for 9 cents a share, even though the publicly traded company’s stock at the time was going for 38 cents a share. They got a whopping $160,000.
The “gain” young Steinberg said he needed to “offset” was from a Flip Record deal, and that it was necessary to write it off before year end.
But that initial amount apparently wasn’t enough. On Dec. 28, Steinberg dumped another 50,000 shares. “I sold it on the open market, also to offset gains from Flip Records,” he noted.
Asked if putting his sexy, pouty-mouthed wife on the cover was a something of a desperate grab to sell more copies, he insisted otherwise. “It’s our first celebrity cover,” he said. “It’s probably a one-shot deal. I don’t think we’d do it again . . . unless it sells phenomenally well.”
Bartiromo, who is a regular columnist for the mag, wrote the cover story in the issue she adorned: about unknown and unheralded analysts who called the current market turmoil correctly.
The spouse-as-celeb cover coincided with a cover-price increase: $2.95 to $3.50.