On Saturday afternoon, Aussie tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes joined forces with Brookfield and offered to buy AGL Energy. The unlikely duo offered a whopping $8 billion for AGL, but on Monday, that deal was shut down.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, who you might know as the co-founder of Atlassian and the Twitter pal of Elon Musk, made the bid alongside Brookfield – a Canadian asset management firm.
Their idea was to own the company as it turned off its coal-fired power stations and replaced them with renewable energy projects.
Earlier this month, AGL revealed it will accelerate the closure of several coal power plants – from 2048 to 2045. Yep, by three years. Climate activists obviously hammered this basically nothing plan.
As our friends at Business Insider Australia reported at the time, Dan Gocher, director of Climate & Environment at the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said AGL’s updated coal plant plan is “next to meaningless for these crumbling assets”.
In making their bid, Cannon-Brookes/Brookfield said they could make AGL Energy have net zero emissions by 2035, 12 years earlier than AGL’s plan.
But in addition to the $8 billion shopping spree, the pair also said they’d invest up to another $10 billion to replace its coal-fired power stations by 2030.
The unsolicited multibillion-dollar offer, however, was politely rejected by the energy giant.
AGL said the proposal “materially undervalues” the company and was not in the “best interests of shareholders”.
“The proposal does not offer an adequate premium for a change of control and is not in the best interests of AGL Energy shareholders,” AGL Energy chairman Peter Botten said, adding the AGL Energy board believed its shareholders would lose the opportunity to realise potential future value from the proposed demerger as both proposed organisations pursued “decisive action on decarbonisation”.
So where to now?
Well, AGL is going ahead with its proposed demerger of AGL Energy to establish two separately listed businesses, AGL Australia and Accel Energy.
As for Cannon-Brookes?
Might be an afternoon espresso kind of day ☕️
— Mike Cannon-Brookes 👨🏼💻🧢🇦🇺 (@mcannonbrookes) February 20, 2022