“Earlier this week, Reddit disclosed in a corporate filing that CEO Steve Hoffman sold 500,000 shares, and Reddit COO Jennifer Wong also disclosed that she sold 514,000 shares.”
If they believed in the platform, they would hold. Yeah looks like they are looking for bag holders.
To be fair (and you can probably see by my username I don’t like reddit anymore), I think it makes perfect sense to dispose of a fair portion of your shares in this situation. Firstly, these asshats get paid part of their salary in shares, it’s natural to want to get more security on part of your income. Secondly, with how hard the price rose in the first couple of days, it makes sense. But people are welcome to disagree, of course.
How does that respond to the original idea, that is:
if they believed in the company, they would hold their stock.
You are not a genius for selling your company’s stock after IPO, you are a grifter. Doesn’t matter how many voting shares they have, doesn’t matter how much more money they need - they do get paid in cash too, and they can borrow against the stock.
The point would be to diversify assets. You don’t want to gamble everything on the hope the thing you believe in is successful. Not that I think they believe in the platform, but it is probably a smart idea to diversify no matter what. 25% of your shares does seem like a lot though.
If they sold at $50 a share, they pocketed over $25M each. Even after taxes, that is more than enough to live comfortably in any region’s cost of living.
Them not selling isn’t any more greedy. No matter what, they own the value of the stocks, whether they liquidate them or not. It’s fucked up that anyone gets paid that amount in general, but they did and it’s theirs. I don’t know what you people would want from them. Isn’t holding onto the shares hoping the value goes up even more greedy?
Imagine talking about faith in that situation. If you really think faith is a good base for financial decisions you better keep far away from the stock market.
I have nothing I’m willing to defend about Reddit management, I love the idea that they will end up penniless one day (though I’m sure that will not happen.)
I just don’t think selling off 25% of one’s shares (necessarily) means what has been suggested.
Keeping everything when these shares represent almost your entire net worth = I know with 100% certainty that this business will grow
Selling off 25% = I believe in the company, but I also acknowledge that there are many variables outside of my control that can affect the success of this company and I don’t want those to have huge negative repercussions on my life.
I don’t know how much of a bag holding exercise it is instead of a “treat yoself” moment. Half a million shares at $50/share is $25 mil, minus 50% taxes is $12.5 mil.
That isn’t that much money in the bay area. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lot. But that’s just a $4 million house with another $1 million in furnishings, and I’m guessing a nice car or two. Take the other $6 mil and invest in a diverse portfolio. They’ve basically sold their stock so they can square away their personal lives.
Awarded themselves shitloads of stock, then sold a quarter of their shares each as soon as humanly possible. That money is not being invested in the company, it’s going straight in these individual’s pockets.
I wasn’t trying to make a “won’t someone think about the shareholders” argument. Thanks for the strawman.
Really the gist of what I was after is “you’d do the same in their position”. $12.5 mil is a lot, but we’re not talking about $12.5mil/year. Its a one time sale. Someone that earns $100,000/yr just saw 125 years of income materialize in a couple seconds. But if you had the same opportunity, you’d probably do the same. If you would instead donate it to charity, please let us know which charities you’d donate to.
Fair enough, you didn’t say you condone it. But your comment does read with much more support than I would offer. And asking me which charities I’d donate to… ha! I don’t see why that’s relevant. Maybe I would do the same, but I don’t already have an $800,000/yr base salary.
More relevant: this windfall would be 250yrs income for me. And on that income I already do donate to charity (albeit probably about 2% of my earnings). If this chump followed my percentage they would be donating 6 whole years worth of my salary on this windfall (plus 1/3 of my salary per year).
The point is “treating yoself” to $12mil after tax is absolutely obscene whatever way you look at it. Not to mention still sitting on 3x more than that.
That’s not how stocks work. Share value doesn’t go to the company unless the company sells shares of itself that it owns. It also doesn’t lose money from share value unless it buys shares. The value of shares goes to the shareholder when sold, and it comes out of the wallet of the buyer.
It’s a show of a lack of faith maybe, but it doesn’t effect the company at all except for the effect on stock value from selling if the company also decides to liquidate shares too.
Share prices don’t only fall if the company liquidated stock. They will also fall from something like a mass sell-off because lower and lower prices will be commanded to sell large volumes of stock.
You know, like the one in the article that talks about the 25% drop in share value.
Yeah, I mentioned selling dropping the price, but the price doesn’t effect the company except for the stocks the company itself sells. Having an extremely high or low stock value doesn’t matter if the company isn’t selling stocks. It’s only an indication that the company is doing well or poorly.
Stock Market Capitalism is just imaginary numbers made up by rich people to convince other rich people to give them money. It’s completely ephemeral.
The fact that it can rise or fall with nothing more than a silly antic from one person is proof about how insubstantial and frankly ridiculous the whole scheme is.
Well I mean money has been arbitrary since it was invented. Why is one shiny metal more desirable than another shiny metal? Because it’s yellow. Rarity didn’t even always factor into it; centuries ago the Spanish tearing up South America looking for gold dumped enormous amounts of platinum into the ocean because nobody “knew” it was valuable. Because it was the wrong color but not actual silver.
Fun fact: the capstone on the Washington Monument is a nine-inch tall piece of aluminum. It was expensive because it was difficult to refine until the Bayer process was developed two years after it was set.
Stock price is really just a present value of future expected earnings. Buying Coke for $100 is because you think the earnings of that share in the future is worth $100. So yes, if the company makes an announcement that it isn’t as profitable, the price will go down, because buyers won’t want to pay the same for an asset that is returns less than it was expedited to.
Yes, there are complications. Shorts, futures, non dividend yielding shares, and more make it more muddied. At the end of it though, the future expected earnings are what is being bought and sold.
“Earlier this week, Reddit disclosed in a corporate filing that CEO Steve Hoffman sold 500,000 shares, and Reddit COO Jennifer Wong also disclosed that she sold 514,000 shares.”
This reminds me of the things preceding the 1929 stock market crash. I’m not a history expert and know very little about it, but I recall that just before it happened, many people who ordinarily did not care about the stock market or had to means to care about suddenly started speculating in the market. That may not have lead to the crash but possibly it was a symptom of whatever has fuckening. I think just looking at us all here talking about how reddit this and that blah blah, that’s a symptom of the impending market crash of the early 20’s. LOL it would be hilarious if it happened exactly in 2029.
Robots.txt is a compliance standard afaik, more like an advisory guide. It cannot enforce bans on scrapers, it sets some polite boundaries for the website.
It has 1/100th of the users of Reddit and it’s just a Twitter clone but it’s meme stocking because Trump is on there. Obviously the company isn’t actually worth billions but it’s a fun comparison.
not only is it a mastodon clone, it’s an out of date, wretchedly insecure mastodon clone. cause, you know, trump gets the BEST people lol… fucking clown show
Because most people don’t recognize a fundamental difference between capital “C” capitalism (the economic principal of supply and demand. and “venture capitalism” which is about speculating on a business’ future based on what essentially amounts to a magic 8 ball.
It’s all just rigged gambling. That money won’t benefit the company at all. The investors just sold all their stocks to the hedge funds and retirement funds for them to lose money on, like always. The IPO was just a way to pay off investors and let executives cash in their stocks. I’d love to know what restrictions on selling came with the stocks that were given to regular employees and users/mods. Like are they allowed to sell right away or do they have to hold it for some period of time?
But about as democratic as can be. No one was forced to buy Reddit. Benefit or not to the company, the company was essentially sold. The new owners of their very own choice will want a return. A big return to essentially cover 8 billion they just paid for it.
Reddit will need tens of billions in revenue to make the profits those new owners will demand. It is that drive to justify the cost that will make it another shitty bloated ad platform.
But that’s not really how the stock market works anymore. Now investors don’t buy stock to support a company and draw a portion of the profits. That version of the market hasn’t existed for a while.
Now, the market is used as a gambling platform for wealthy people and is kept afloat only by IRA, 401k, charitable trusts, etc. Basically, a company is having trouble with profit. You buy into the company, put in a CEO you can control, have them boost the price at the expense of employees, customers, and long-term profit. Sell the stock. Let the company fall apart.
Then buy it low, have the CEO make up a new product based on whatever tech fad is popular. Sell just before the money is spent. Let the project fail because all the money was spent on marketing and consultants and not on the employees to actually do the project. Buy up the stock again, do some stock buybacks, sell again, etc.
But it’s never a strategy of: hire really good employees, make them happy, give them an achievable project with enough funding, increase the company’s reputation by making quality products, etc. That requires actually good business plans and products and a lot of work and no short term, “hey look at how much money I saved by cutting budgets even though everyone said our products will be crap without it,” kinds of flashy quarterly reports.
Playing the gambling game is more reliable profit and with retirement funds and all that keeping serious market crashes from happening, and the politicians being on their side and willing to bail them out if it does get bad, there’s a lot of wiggle room and a lot of people to lose money and funnel to them that doesn’t affect the corporations.
Sure. I’m just pointing out that a million bucks isn’t that much in the grand scheme. A life-changing amount to just get one day, sure. But it’s still basically “own a house” rich. Woopty-do. Every boomer within 10 miles of a major metro with a paid of mortgage is nearly a millionaire just in their primary residence.
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