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Who is behind GTEN? Gores Group (Alec Gores)

The people who set Gores X up, what they have done before, and what happened to the shareholders who backed their earlier vehicles — every outcome cited to an SEC filing.

51/100Mixed recordhigh confidence

Post-close outcome quality: 7 priced deSPACs vs trust value (prior vehicles against the $10.00 IPO baseline, in-DB vehicles against the trust they filed): median -48%, 4/7 still worth at least half of trust, 1 at under a tenth of it. Worst: PSNY -95%. Best: Hostess Brands +243%. 2 more delisted with no surviving quote — scored as a total loss (a known outcome, not a gap), with no % invented.

Mixed record · high confidence — the same inputs always produce the same score.

Track record

The fleet this sponsor runs today, and the SEC-verified fate of every prior vehicle we have traced.

Gores Group (Alec Gores)
14 vehicles · 12 prior · 9 completed · 2 searching · 3 liquidated
Prior vehicles (SEC-verified — 12)

Gores Group — Alec Gores' franchise, one of the most prolific US SPAC platforms. Prior-vehicle track record (SEC-verified via formerNames): (1) Gores Holdings I COMPLETED → Hostess Brands (2016). (2) Gores Holdings II COMPLETED → Verra Mobility (VRRM, Nasdaq, still listed). (3) Gores Holdings III COMPLETED → PAE Inc (2020; later acquired, Form 25-NSE 2022-02). (4) Gores Holdings IV COMPLETED → UWM Holdings / United Wholesale Mortgage (UWMC, NYSE, still listed). (5) Gores Holdings V COMPLETED → Ardagh Metal Packaging (AMBP). (6) Gores Holdings VI COMPLETED → Matterport (acquired by CoStar, 25-NSE 2025-02). (7) Gores Metropoulos COMPLETED → Luminar Technologies (LAZR; deregistered 15-12G 2026-04). (8) Gores Metropoulos II COMPLETED → Sonder Holdings (25-NSE 2026-01). (9) Gores Guggenheim COMPLETED → Polestar Automotive (PSNY, 2022). LIQUIDATED (25-NSE + 15-12G, no target): Gores Holdings VII (2022), VIII (2022, Footprint deal terminated), IX (2024). Net: 9 completed deSPACs, 3 liquidations. Strong completer; mixed post-close (Verra Mobility/UWM held up; Matterport, Sonder, Luminar, Polestar struggled or delisted). Sources: SEC EDGAR submissions API (formerNames) + full-text search, efts.sec.gov. — research profile — The Gores Group was founded in 1987 by Alec E. Gores, an Israeli-born billionaire businessman who immigrated to Flint, Michigan at age fifteen and built his fortune through leveraged buyouts of technology firms. After founding and selling Executive Business Systems to Contel in 1986 for roughly $10 million, Gores established The Gores Group with a vision to buy, fix, and sell businesses, pioneering an operational approach to private equity investing. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, California with an office in Boulder, Colorado, the firm has acquired or invested in over 130 companies and has deployed approximately $4 billion of institutional capital across multiple vehicles. Forbes estimates Gores's net worth at $2.4 billion as of 2026. The SPAC vehicles are technically separate entities from The Gores Group with separate management, though there is overlap in personnel and target industry focus. Key principals alongside Gores include Mark R. Stone, a Senior Managing Director who serves as CEO of the SPAC vehicles, as well as Managing Director Catherine Pollard, Principal Joseph Skarzenski, and Senior Advisors Edward Johnson, Jennifer Kwon Chou, and Ravi Raghunathan. Gores is widely regarded as one of the most prolific SPAC sponsors in the market, having sponsored more than a dozen SPACs since 2015 as an early adopter of the blank-check structure. The Wall Street Journal profiled him as "The Man With More SPACs Than Anyone," and Wikipedia describes The Gores Group as a "premier SPAC sponsor" that has completed more than seven SPAC transactions representing over $36 billion in transaction value. His SPACs have taken a diverse set of companies public, including Hostess Brands (via Gores Holdings I in a $2.5 billion acquisition in 2016), Verra Mobility (Gores Holdings II, 2018), PAE (Gores Holdings III, $1.6 billion, 2020), United Wholesale Mortgage (Gores Holdings IV, 2021, described as the largest SPAC business combination to date), Luminar Technologies (Gores Metropoulos, 2020), Ardagh Metal Packaging (Gores Holdings V, 2021), Matterport (Gores Holdings VI, 2021), Polestar (Gores Guggenheim, 2022, at a $20 billion implied enterprise value), and Sonder (Gores Metropoulos II, 2022). Additional vehicles include Gores Holdings VII through XI, Gores Technology Partners I and II, and Gores Guggenheim, with IPO sizes ranging from $275 million to $800 million. The Los Angeles Business Journal named Gores its 2021 Business…

Full sponsor record →

The full Gores Group (Alec Gores) profile

Why the sponsor matters

The thirty-second version, for anyone who has never traded a SPAC.

A SPAC is an empty listed company; the sponsor is the only substance it has before a deal. They pick the target, negotiate the terms, and typically hold founder shares — equity they received nearly free — which pay off for them even in deals that lose public holders money. A sponsor’s prior vehicles are the closest thing to evidence about how this one ends.

How the founder-share incentive works is covered in our plain-English guide to the sponsor promote.

In plain English

Cash in trust / trust per sharethe cash the company is holding for each public share

Filed quarterly in the 10-Q's XBRL. It earns interest between filings, so the figure on a given day is slightly higher than the last filed one — where we show that we label it an estimate.

Dilutionhow much of the company new shares take from you

Sponsor promote, PIPE shares, warrants and rights all issue stock that did not pay $10 for it. The headline deal value is before that; the effective value is after.

De-SPACthe day the SPAC becomes the real company

The shares stop being a claim on a pot of cash and start being equity in an operating business. Roughly 80% of recent de-SPACs traded below $10 within a year.