Celsius Holdings stock surged almost 1,000% in 2020.
Courtesy of Celsius Holdings
Carl DeSantis was a few years removed from his big payday—the $1.8 billion sale of Rexall Sundown, the publicly traded nutritional vitamin company he founded—when his longtime business partner, Jim Steinhauser, brought him his first six-pack of a new sugar-free energy drink called Celsius about 15 years ago. DeSantis trusted his instinctual eye for a good product and thought he’d stumbled upon a winner when he tasted the drink, which was made by a small mom-and-pop outfit then based in Delray Beach, Florida, where he lives.
Not many people agreed with him over the next decade. DeSantis was the largest investor in Celsius Holdings when it went public for the first time in 2008, but after just three money-losing years, it was delisted from the Nasdaq with the stock tanking. DeSantis kept investing millions for marketing and advertising, and it took its second try at the public…
