heads of high-tech corporations are selling shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars – Kommersant

The heads of American technology corporations actively sold shares of their companies in the first quarter. Sales volumes amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Writes about this Financial Times (FT), citing data from Verity, a company that tracks such transactions. According to her information, the level of insider sales was at a record level since 2021.

Thus, the founder of the online retailer Amazon, Jeffrey Bezos, sold 50 million shares of the corporation in February for $8.5 billion. The founder of the Meta corporation (recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation), Mark Zuckerberg, sold shares for $135 million in February. The co-founder also sold shares for $175 million Palantir intelligence software developer Charles Thiel. Another similar deal was the sale of $69 million in shares by Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman.

According to analysts, sales of shares of their companies may be a sign that the growth of shares of technology companies may soon give way to a decline in their prices. “If they (heads of high-tech companies.— “Kommersant”) believe that we are now at the peak, and they are selling, this is a pretty convincing signal for everyone else. Insider selling of a large number of shares by senior executives is never a good sign. This means they have found a better place to place their assets than the companies they manage,” said Charles Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware.

“We are looking at (corporate insider selling.— “Kommersant”) as negative data that investors should be aware of,” notes Ben Silverman, vice president of research at Verity. Moreover, in his opinion, this is partly due to the low level of insider sales in 2022 and 2023, when shares of technology companies declined.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya