EFE.- The great millionaires of the 21st century, the technology giants Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have not only enriched themselves during the pandemic, but in 2021 they continue to increase their fortunes by getting rid of their shares, which are at maximum, faced with the threat of tax changes.
The sale of shares of these top executives or “insiders” (as people with positions in a company are known) of corporate America has skyrocketed in 2021 to levels never seen before, with a combined collection of nearly 69 billion to date, 30% more than in the whole of last year.
The figure, compiled by InsiderScore / Verity, which analyzes the operations of the “insiders” to generate investment ideas and has institutional money managers as clients, is due to “a combination of factors” led by the flashy appreciation of the shares said its director of research, Ben Silverman.
“The appreciation of (stock) prices, unsurprisingly, has resulted in some ‘insiders’ behaving opportunistically,” added Silverman.
Top Seller of 2021 by Raising Value is Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon and now dedicated to his space travel company Blue Origin and philanthropic projects, who has sold shares worth 9.97 billion throughout all of 2021, attributed to a preconfigured plan called “10b5-1”.
Broadly speaking, the “10b5-1” plans, established by the Securities Market Commission (SEC), allow large holders of shares to set up passive purchase and sale operations in advance to avoid being accused of the use of inside information.
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Bezos’s sales on Amazon “were not unusual, and in 2020 he sold even more shares than this year,” but those of another of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, did draw the expert’s attention: “He had not sold since 2010, in the company’s IPO.”
Musk has raised $ 5.4 billion in just one month since he put a vote on the fate of a portion of his shareholding on Twitter on November 6, with the option to sell as the winner.
The founder of Meta (new Facebook name), Mark Zuckerberg, has pocketed 4.470 million this year with practically daily sales, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have raised about 1.5 billion, all of them following these types of plans.
The Walton family, the richest in the US and heir to the Walmart supermarket chain, meanwhile, has made $ 6.18 billion since January as part of regular sales going to their nonprofit foundation.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, was making headlines this week for his decision to sell more than half of his company titles, some 840,000, for $ 285 million due to “personal planning and financial diversification reasons.”
There are suspicions that another implicit reason for these massive stock sales has to do with taxation, since the pressure may soon increase: in the state of Washington – where Microsoft is based – from January there will be a higher tax on income long-term capital, and at the federal level, a higher tax rate on millionaire income is debated in Congress.
“Potential changes to tax codes at the federal and state levels are also a likely factor for some insiders,” explained Silverman, who also took into consideration the large number of companies that have come onto the market in recent years.
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