It’s a low amount though (2000*36=€72k). What is more concerning is his 50,610 shares that he sold in total in the past year, as now that is a fairly big amount if he planned this move many months ago.
To be fair, these guys are much more suspicious:
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.
EDIT:
Yeah, nothing really unusual in Riccitiello’s trades. He may be an asshole but that’s no reason to immediately accuse him of insider trading for a lousy $77.15k worth of shares given that he already has a pattern of selling way bigger amounts:
EDIT 2:
Here’s Riccitiello’s filing for that trade: https://www.secform4.com/filings/1810806/0001810806-23-000163.htm
Read in particular this part:
( 2 )The sales reported on this Form 4 were effected pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by the Reporting Person on May 19, 2023.
That’s not insider trading. That’s a pre-planned trade (see Investopedia’s entry about Rule 10b5-1) that would have been executed no matter what.
Yeah, 2000 is nothing compared to the 50k shares he sold already. I think the bigger data point is probably how many shares does he own in total. It’s not uncommon to diversity and minimize some exposure to one company. Give stock is a major compensation structure for ceo’s, it makes sense they they liquidate it at periodically. I’m curious is September 1 is a vesting day or something for stock awards.
never found the trades themselves suspicious (scheduled vesting) but the timing of their announcement, which JR had complete control over, is a bit fucky. Consider they edited the wiki in mid June. Then wait two months to announce a huge policy change, right after everyone that was getting out had already gotten gone.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly none of these options seem to add anything of tangible quality to actual life, just yet another bit of scamming people out of money somehow to add to the general dystopian vibe.
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.
No, that’s the total price, not the price per share. An F-35 is like 10 to 30B, isn’t it?
