The world's richest shareholders are selling their holdings and putting them in their pockets.

Insiders, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have recently accelerated the pace of their holdings, taking advantage of the 14-month bull market.

Sergey Brin

As of the first week of May, insiders of US-listed companies had reduced their holdings worth $24.4 billion this year, about half of which were sold through trading plans, according to Bloomberg data. This is close to the total reduction of their holdings in the second half of 2020 ($30 billion).

Major shareholders often sell shares step by step through pre-arranged trading plans. However, the long-term rise in the stock market has made the value of their holdings very high-both planned and random.

There are a variety of reasons for selling holdings, big or small. After the rise in the anti-epidemic market, as inflation rises, valuation pressure is increasing. Investors are wary that a post-epidemic recovery could prompt the Fed to tighten policy. President Joe Biden's proposed tax increases have created uncertainty-including a near doubling of capital gains tax.

Bezos and Ellison

Whatever the reason, the sale of shareholdings brings more liquidity to the market, and the consequences spread to philanthropy, the art market, real estate and other areas.

Larry Ellison

Bezos sold $6.7 billion worth of Amazon shares this year. Although it is a drop in the bucket for the world's richest man, it is equivalent to more than 2/3 of the amount of shares he sold in 2020. Larry Ellison has sold 7 million Oracle shares in the past week, totaling $552.3 million.

Brin has said it intends to sell no more than 250000 shares of Alphabet Inc.. According to the filing, he has reduced his holdings worth $163 million in recent days, the first such reduction in more than four years.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg and his charitable foundation, the Chen and Zuckerberg Foundation, accelerated the sale of Facebook shares. Zuckerberg or the foundation has been reducing its holdings almost every day since November, totaling more than $1.87 billion.

Thorne Perkin, president of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management, said that the wealth of many tech tycoons is made up of single holdings, and the rise in the market has increased the concentration of risk.

"from a portfolio management perspective, diversification makes sense," he says. "

Epidemic economy

Yuan Zheng

Some of the sellers with the largest share sales are the biggest beneficiaries of the epidemic economy. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Yuan Zheng, founder of, Zoom Video Communications, and Ernest Garcia II of Carvana Co., a used-car company, have earned more than $1.75 billion since March 2020. George Kurtz, chief executive of cyber security company CrowdStrike, sold at least $250 million worth of shares during that period.

Yuan Zheng, founder of Zoom, accelerated the pace of share sales this year as the company's share price fell. In 2020, he reduced his holdings by an average of about 140000 shares a month through a trading program, earning more than $350 million for the year.

Since March, he has sold an average of nearly 200000 shares a month for about $185 million. A spokesman said that in accordance with the usual heritage planning practice, he also donated more than 1/3 of his shareholding. Some of his proceeds from the sale of shares were donated to unspecified "humanitarian causes".