Come on people you're all staring at flashing LEDs distracting you and you're ignoring the giant spolight of Riccitiello's ownership of over 400,000 EA shares.
He moved the EA stock price by 2 dollars the day they announced the Unity deal.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Unity did a bad thing, but the stock sale here is a complete non-event.
According to Guru Focus, Unity CEO John Riccitiello, one of the highest-paid bosses in gaming, sold 2,000 Unity shares on September 6, a week prior to its September 12 announcement. Guru Focus notes that this follows a trend, reporting that Riccitiello has sold a total of 50,610 shares this year, and purchased none.
He receives and sells stock constantly, as do most execs of publicly traded companies. Their compensation is majority stock, which incentivizes them to maximize stock prices since a higher price means more money RIGHT NOW for them. Look up any publicly traded company and peek at their insider trading info. Microsoft as a random reference and here's Unity so you can see everyone else and the long term trends.
The piece cites Guru Focus as their source of this info as if they have some keen inside information or something, but it's literally public data that anyone with an internet connection can look up as these sorts of notices are required for publicly traded companies. Riccitiello only sold about $83k worth of stock before the announcement for a total of about $1.1M worth of stock this year, vs about $33M last year, and close to $100M in 2021. The idea that he dumped $83k worth of stock to beat bad news Unity was dropping is just a hilariously bad take.
Pretty much every smoking gun insider trading story trending in social media.
Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Unity, we keep asking why these corporations are so greedy, but we know the answer. Because we let them be.
Why shouldn't Google sell your porn history to the Saudis and Russians? Is your use of their search engine/apps going to change if they do? Even if it does, does it effect their sales? Are they actually going to be held accountable for their scumbag actions? Why should they give the slightest FUCK about you, if you're never going to cause a problem for them?
No. They're not.
I’m not really sure what to make of this - I’ve been hearing people both bring up that he sold stock in isolation, and I’ve heard others say this is part of a routine pre-planned stock sale. Presuming he’s not performing obvious inside trading, I imagine it’s the latter.
I know capitalism bad and unity CEO bad, but is there actually anything to this? If not, why does this keep getting brought up? (I mean this as an actual question, not loaded)
I'm not a financial expert, but in my layperson opinion, I'd say at the very least, it is suspicious and needs to be investigated.
Going by this commenter this seems like a nothing burger.
Obviously, fuck this CEO for all he’s having occur to Unity, but the stock sale doesn’t ultimately seem that important or relevant.
Some rat-off-sinking-ship move? Only in this case the rat also was responsible for the sinking, and leaves with a pile of cash? But then I'm no expert in neither gaming nor stocks, nor ships.
Watching turbo capitalism eat itself live and in colour is rad.
I'm no expert either, but this could be a deliberate exit plan that CEOs do, or if he plans to stick around, it could be a deliberate ploy to buy back shares at a lower price - so even if he bought back everything he sold, he'd be making a big profit. Could also be combined with a ploy to introduce the actual pricing plan they wanted to implement all along, and when they implement it, it won't seem so bad combined to what they've proposed currently and people, especially those deeply invested in the Unity ecosystem, will lap it up.
Or like most CEOs all his trading is done by a 3rd party so there is no conflict of interest
Unity’s president of growth, who sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
You could buy an f-35 fighter jet in myrtle beach for that kind of money.
You could buy a cockpit handle for that much
No, that's the total price, not the price per share. An F-35 is like 10 to 30B, isn't it?
Not in Myrtle Beach it isn't, that's the point. Might want to look up F-35 news hehe.
Lol no. Its cost is around the 150 million mark
still, that's 2 orders of magnitude off
He knows.
Did he also update his resume, book a moving company and buy a first class plane ticket?
There's nothing to this individual sale, it's just "CEO bad". Given that apparently he's had a bunch of sales planned for a while, it suggests he thinks the share price isn't going to increase over that time.
Why do we let execs sell stock received as compensation at all?
They literally take out tax free loans with the stocks as collateral. Dodging the entire capital gains system.
Because stock you can't sell is worthless.
It’s worth whatever it sells for when you resign. Which, if you did a good job, is way more than what it would’ve sold for the day you got it.
If you're doing a good job, though, why would you want to resign?
And if, for reasons beyond their control, the stock price is going to fall (e.g. new international tariffs or something), why should they be handcuffed to that decrease in value?
How is this not insider trading?
Because it's scheduled. He probably just has a "sell all of my stock bonuses as I receive them" order to his broker. If he doesn't actually get involved in the day-to-day decision making of his stock portfolio, then there's no special knowledge involved in the sale.
he didn't have control over the trades, but he controlled the timing of the announcement entirely.
they knew since june (when the TOS was edited), but waited until last week to drop their stinker of a plan after everyone had already cashed out what they wanted to.
almightysnoo above posted this, which I think is revealing:
Chief among them being Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, who sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
That makes sense. Thought there would be a reasonable explanation for it.
This should be beyond illegal.
This kind of white collar crime should be punishable in days for dollars.
Afaik, it is. This news is blown out of proportion. Getting an approval to sell your shares takes like half a year, so these were actually sold way in advance. And he sold basically a couple of shares, compared to what he still holds. They are still scummy, but this is just an attention grabbing article.