Zuckerberg and Bezos dispose of thousands of shares in their companies – Markets

The recent boom in the stock market of technology companies is leading many leaders and workers in the sector to sell shares in their companies. According to the Financial Times, the trend has been at its highest since 2021 and, among the market players, are names such as Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos.

Zuckerberg has a vast history of selling shares in Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. However, it will have intensified the placing of securities on the market this year, as the tech giant’s share price increased.

In early February, it sold 291,000 shares for $135 million, in what was its first large sale since November 2021. Still, Zuckerberg remains Meta’s main shareholder, with 13.5% of outstanding shares. Jeff Bezos, from Amazon, also put 50 million shares up for sale in February, with a total value of 8.5 billion dollars. In turn, Andy Jassy, ​​executive president of the company, has sold 21.1 million dollars in shares since the beginning, an amount that is close to the 23.6 million dollars he had sold in total in 2023 and 2022.

Finally, Peter Thiel sold off $175 million worth of shares in Palantir, the data analysis group he founded, this month. It was its biggest sale of the company’s shares since February 2021, when it placed $504.8 million in securities on the market.

“Sales of large amounts of shares by high-level executives are never a good sign”, he emphasizes Charles Elson, from the University of Delaware. “It means they found a better place to plant their assets than the businesses they run.”

Analysts believe that the boom in the technology sector, riding on the enthusiasm caused by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, is about to wane.