“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.
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.
Won’t somebody think of the poor shareholders.
When I treat myself, it’s to a takeaway meal that’s like $20. Reddit has “never made a profit”™. Siphoning $16mil out of it on day one is obscene.
In what way do you think they’ve siphoned $16mm out of Reddit?
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.
We all knew this was a pump and dump scheme. Spez got his, fuck everyone else.
did he really though? because I’d read a big chunk of that massive 100+ million dollar compensation was shares vested after IPO based on performance.
hopefully it ruins them all.
I want Elon Musk to buy Reddit. 😈
Elon: “Now that I’ve purchased reddit, we’re going to rename it x.”
Person with an ounce of common sense: "But you already changed twitter’s name to that.
Elon: “Don’t be stupid. I named it X, whereas reddit is going to be x. It’s going to be a totally different brand.”
Oh no it would be stupider than that. He would merge Twitter and Reddit as part of his “everything app” which is what he actually wants “X” to be and why he’s doing things like trying to turn Twitter into a bank.
Next he will rename himself to XxElon MuskxX
Holy shit that would be hilarious!
This is evil and wild.
This is the way!
If he does buy it he’ll probably rate limit it like Twitter
Whomp whomp
Yikes Shaggy, it was the old amusement park owner all along.
Ellen Pao is long gone, though.
Removed by mod
Well nice to see racism alive and well on Lemmy.
Reddit has a market cap of $7.8 Billion right now.
Truth Social had a market cap of $8.4 Billion.
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.
The stock market has a lot of magical thinking behind it. That’s why there are constant frauds.
Influencing Spez’s options on steel tarrifs isn’t worth as much as the founder of Truth Social
At least truth social is open source
Why were insiders allowed to sell so quickly?
There’s a lot of confused people in these threads. Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares as part of the ipo, so they were some of the shares sold immediately before they opened on the market (at the about $30/share price). He still holds 4.1 million shares. Other insiders sold some shares as well. Some shares were created to raise money for the company. Once the ipo actually happens and the price for all those shares is negotiated with the bank assisting and all initial buyers, then it begins trading on the open market. At that point they are in a lockup period, and they can’t sell anything for about 180 days. All of this is in sec filings, where you can see the source of all the shares that were part ot the ipo.
Look I hate Steve Huffman too, I’m here on lemmy after all. But this is a grossly over valued tech stock and there hasn’t been many tech ipos in a while. It’s very not surprising it would start sinking after an initial explosion of buying activity. It’s not dropping from insiders unloading stock right now though. They’re in lockup.
Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares as part of the ipo, so they were some of the shares sold immediately before they opened on the market (at the about $30/share price).
I suspected as much. I got the invite too, and thought about putting some money in. But I didn’t want to risk the chance of being King Steven’s exit liquidity, even if I could make some money on it, so I passed.
I wouldn’t have wanted to buy anything either. It’s actually slightly more progressive than most ipo’s in that sense though since it offered a chance to buy shares directly, but that’s not really saying much. A true public offering would allow anyone to place orders as a part of the initial sale. Usually just large financial institutions have the chance and then the price is very inflated by the time most retail traders would be allowed to buy. If we really want to help the rampant wealth inequality in the economy too, there should me some mandated equity that goes to employees whose labor built the company so everyone, and not just the board and a few venture capitalists, can profit from the stock sales. Which I guess is a roundabout way of saying workers should own the means of production. It doesn’t make sense to reward only so few for the work and ideas of so many individuals. And I think it’s a huge inefficiency in the economy that is detrimental no matter your view point (unless you’re a billionaire company founder who doesn’t care about the country, economy, or world as a whole I guess).
I believe the employees got taken care of here, at least the ones that worked for them directly and stuck it out. Equity compensation is such a key part of Silicon Valley culture that they probably couldn’t even hire devs straight out of college without offering them some stock.
I agree, tech companies are better than most in providing equity as a part of compensation, even for lower level workers. I wish it were that way across the entire economy though.
I was indeed confused and didn’t ask that question with any agenda. It makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for clarifying.
Absolutely, and I did not mean to imply you were asking with any agenda, just trying to be helpful. The articles about this are bascially clickbait and implying things that aren’t true in the headlines for more outrage. I think it’s unfortunate because there is so much to be outraged about in the process of ipo’s, how equity in companies is distributed in general, and who profits, and the clickbait distracts from the things we should truly be outraged about with some false controversies.
Let me show you this tiny violin 🎻
The layout change this week is what did them in.
Wow, it doesn’t even resemble Reddit anymore. I was also immediately hit with a full page ad. Glad I left.
It somehow looks like a more pic heavy twitter. It’s insane how much a site that was built and grew on its comment system seems to try and hide it now.
Because it’s bots all the way down
thoughts and prayers; go bears.
I so rarely get to do my c/news duty outside of that community, and you’re welcome.
Hold on guys. I want to sell you all together for a lot of money. I mean not you personally just everything you write. No worries 😁.
What are our rights with posts on lemmy? Can AI companies just scrape the data?
If it is publicly accessible, then yes, they scrape the data.
This is literally how search engines have worked since damn near the inception of the internet.
Wasn’t there robots.txt at least?
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.
There was, and still is
I’ll stick to VTI and VXUS.
Called it. Overvalued. The site has been is in dire need of investments to improve the platform. Give tools for the moderators to do their job properly (they’re already working for free), improve the page layout, fight bots in a more intelligent manner, find innovative ways to make the platform turn a profit instead of resorting to the most assholeish, intrusive and abusive ways ever. But instead the dipshit that runs that dumpster fire gave himself a huge undeserved paycheck with the money that should have been used to do that so when it inevitably comes crashing down he has made some reserves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the traffic on that site is bots farming karma so they can spam some ads at that point and a significant portion of human accounts they have left are probably shadow banned by false bot detection. Every attempt they’ve made to make money out of the platform was so terribly thought through that it just unnecessarily resulted in a far worse experience for the userbase than it needed to, screwed over the people who work for free to keep running and was met with huge backlash every time. And they still can’t turn a profit.
