Loading
Distinct shells carrying a filed role for this person — not every shell they have ever touched.
Of those vehicles, the ones that closed a merger.
Announced but not closed, and still hunting.
No closed vehicle here has both a stored price and a filed trust value to score it against.
1 vehicle on file, newest listing first
none appears on more than one
Joseph Aron Samuels is a New York-based hedge fund executive and SPAC director who currently serves as a Class I director of Willow Lane Acquisition Corp. II (WLII), a blank check company headquartered at 250 West 57th Street, New York. He was appointed to the board effective June 22, 2026, and filed his initial beneficial ownership statement (Form 3) on June 26, 2026. Willow Lane Acquisition Corp. II was founded on August 1, 2025, and is led by Chairman and CEO Benjamin Luke Weil, with Samuels joining a board that includes independent directors Jeremy Rayne Steinberg, Simón Gaviria Muñoz, Robert G. Stevens, and Mauricio Orellana. The company entered into a joinder to its letter agreement and indemnity agreement with Samuels on terms consistent with those of its other officers and directors.
Samuels is best known as the founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Islet Management, LP (also referred to as Islet Capital Management), a role he has held since January 2018. Islet Capital is described as an adaptive investment firm known for its innovative approaches in the finance industry. Prior to founding Islet, Samuels spent 14 years as a Partner at Och-Ziff Capital Management (later known as Sculptor Capital Management), a hedge fund with peak assets under management of approximately $48 billion. During his tenure at Och-Ziff, he held numerous key roles including serving on the Portfolio Management Committee, the Risk Committee, and the Managing Director Committee, as well as acting as Head of Trading and Co-Head of the U.S. Equity Business. In these capacities, he worked closely with banks and other market participants to create capital solutions for individual companies and sectors and served as a balance sheet partner for strategic dispositions and funding opportunities. He also hired and developed investment talent, managing numerous analysts and traders. Before joining Och-Ziff, Samuels worked at Pequot Capital Management and, prior to that, at Merrill Lynch.
Samuels earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Rutgers College (Rutgers University–New Brunswick). Born and raised in New Jersey, he has over 14 years of experience in investments and is described as a hedge fund strategist and expert in managing equity securities and equity-related agreements. Beyond his finance career, Samuels has demonstrated a commitment to the arts and education, launching the Joseph Samuels Scholarship for Visual Arts in January 2024, a one-time $1,000 award designed to support aspiring visual artists who demonstrate exceptional creativity, commitment to personal growth, and dedication to the visual arts. He is also associated with Channel Partners, another venture he founded. Samuels is based in New York and maintains an active professional network of over 500 connections. His appointment to the Willow Lane Acquisition Corp. II board brings his deep capital markets expertise and extensive hedge fund leadership experience to the SPAC's search for a business combination target.
This record is keyed to SEC CIK 0002031089 — the identifier this person files under in their own name. Every vehicle above is a filing made under that CIK, so “the same person on two shells” is a fact about an SEC identifier rather than about a name that happens to match.
Roles are the strings the filings used, in the order they were filed. Nothing on this page ranks them, infers seniority, or offers a reason why any two of these names recur — a recurrence is a count, and the filings that produced it are linked beside every row. We also hold 4 institutional-holder rows on these vehicles, under 4 distinct name strings, and none of them is counted across vehicles: that table has no CIK column, and matching holders by name would merge firms that are not the same firm.