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Al Gore Sells $29.5 Million In Apple Stock (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday reveals Apple board member Al Gore this week sold 215,437 shares of Apple stock (APPL) worth about $29.5 million. Gore's stock sale, which was accomplished in multiple trades ranging from $136.4 to $137.12 on Wednesday, nearly matches a $29.6 million purchase of Apple shares made in 2013. When Gore bought the stock batch more than four years ago, he exercised Apple's director stock option to acquire 59,000 shares at a price of about $7.48 per share, costing him approximately $441,000. This was pre-split AAPL, so shares were valued at $502.68 each. Following today's sale, Gore owns 230,137 shares of Apple stock worth $31.5 million at the end of trading on Friday.
. . . of carbon credits!
If he's smart, since Apple's revenues have been losing momentum. The last quarter's numbers were pretty disappointing, after adjusting for the extra week.
That's good work if you can get it. A couple of hours per quarter, and the company usually flies you in and puts you up in swanky digs and takes you out for expensive dinners.
And for the effort he managed to pull in some $60+ million in bonus incentives. Nice.
Although, given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses..... Doesn't that make this..... I dunno, ironic seems inadequate.
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
Director stock options are another unjust method of the one percent to take from everyone else while adding no value.
How do your politicians, both left and right, so filthy rich? Is there even a single poor or middle class politician in the US?
Just wondering, since the rest of the story is not surprising. Of course, it's a good time to sell Apple stock now.
dump, dump DUMP.
A few hundred million in under priced stock options and bonus money for what? You may or may not like Apple, but they're not a stupid company. The value of a few meetings, a couple of favorable trade exceptions, and some lucrative government contract work probably more than covers this expense.
The really civilized thing is, we do almost all of our bribery above board these days.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What does any of this prove or demonstrate? What's it supposed to be telling me? What do I gain by it?
So that makes... algorithmic trading?
So when he acquired them they were worth ~ $500 ... and sold for ~$136. Must have read that wrong, yeah?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
What's in there for us, mere mortals? The guy got lucky and earned 6800% on his investment, great. Now where are the stories of people losing money by investing in a bad stock?
Also, where would most people get $400K to invest in stock options when they have no spare money at all or even owe lots of money until they hit their late 50s?
Or is it a story about a super successful company which is known to have a cult status, which allows it to sell the same product year after year with minimal changes, yet earn billions? I don't understand.
The Global Warming Carbon Credit Kickback Scam is not progressing as he thought it would...
Al Gore is the modern day snake oil salesman. He has perpetuated a brilliant scheme to con everyone into his doomsday predictions and he is the savior to save us all. I guess maybe he finally saw the writing on the wall with Apple. Its another company in demise and has peaked out for the most part. Take the money and run Al to fund another fake dooms day prediction. Is it not enough that you yourself are a big carbon consumer? How about practicing what you preach Al?
And now he's got the funding for Gore 2020. Yay!
I'm sure it is all to help save the polar bears.
Life is too short and too important to { take seriously | use windows }.
This isn't even front page material for Yahoo Finance.
What Apple gets is simple. Stability, sanity and some level of honesty in the face of huge temptation and fear.
You only have to look at Nokia to see what can happen if the wrong people get onto the board of a company. Somehow or other, the Nokia board managed to convince its self that a company which had managed to survive multiple revolutions in mobile communications was best led by a man who had failed repeatedly to build mobile success at Microsoft. The results are well known (image from this article).
Why the did this I have no idea. Panic? Bribes? Stupidity? There has been no clear criminal investigation when there should have been but it seems they were just taken in by fear and a smooth talking failure in Elop. Still, the point is that now Apple may be in a similar situation. They have various long term technologies which won't pay off immediately. Nokia was doing Meego, it's own independent touch screen OS; Apple is doing it's own smart phone chips. They will now be under pressure from Chinese rivals and will go both down as well as up. If you keep working on these technologies you will survive and profit but you are very likely to suffer some relative decline even so. If your board panics and changes everything to try to force growth in a market where there is no more space, you may lose everything that you already have.
No idea if Gore is the right guy, however I know how much could be lost if he's the wrong one. Apple's profits, around $40Billion yearly, are more than ten times Nokia's. Imagine those disappeared in two years because Apple became involved in someone like Microsoft and brought in someone like Elop.
I read through some of the comments on this story, and I couldn't help but notice there were quite a few that related Gore's politics and finance. None gave him any credit at all for financial acumen.
Yet not only did Gore make a lot of money by accepting (at the time cheap) stock for sitting on Apple's board, he made 'way more when he and another guy started up Current TV. Gore built it up and wound up selling it for major bucks.
So basically, Gore showed real financial chops. But because he's an unapologetic liberal and environmentalist, there's all kinds of sniping about private jets and save the whales by the same people who venerate Donald Trump. Yet Trump's main claim to fame is the number of times he's declared bankruptcy in ways allowing him to screw contractors over without losing any of his own money.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
if (you agree with the far right {
you are the smartest latest and greatest person;
Everyone must worship you.
} else {
you are a limousine liberal and a complete hypocrite
}
}else{
if (you agree with far right){
you are to be admired for believing in American dream etc etc
} else {
you must be dumb, because you didn't make money.
Probably consumed by envy and fomenting class warfare
You Enemy number 1 of America.
}
}
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So al Gore sold lots of Apple shares. Someone wanted to appear smart and wrote "sold 215,437 shares of Apple stock (APPL)"
Apparently that idiot isn't aware that APPL is a long defunct oil company that hasn't traded for many years. Apple's stock symbol is AAPL.
$29.5 million? Think how many Manbearpig hunting expeditions that could fund!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What Apple gets is simple. Stability, sanity and some level of honesty in the face of huge temptation and fear.
You only have to look at Nokia to see what can happen if the wrong people get onto the board of a company. Somehow or other, the Nokia board managed to convince its self that a company which had managed to survive multiple revolutions in mobile communications was best led by a man who had failed repeatedly to build mobile success at Microsoft. The results are well known (image from this article).
Why the did this I have no idea. Panic? Bribes? Stupidity? There has been no clear criminal investigation when there should have been but it seems they were just taken in by fear and a smooth talking failure in Elop. Still, the point is that now Apple may be in a similar situation. They have various long term technologies which won't pay off immediately. Nokia was doing Meego, it's own independent touch screen OS; Apple is doing it's own smart phone chips. They will now be under pressure from Chinese rivals and will go both down as well as up. If you keep working on these technologies you will survive and profit but you are very likely to suffer some relative decline even so. If your board panics and changes everything to try to force growth in a market where there is no more space, you may lose everything that you already have.
No idea if Gore is the right guy, however I know how much could be lost if he's the wrong one. Apple's profits, around $40Billion yearly, are more than ten times Nokia's. Imagine those disappeared in two years because Apple became involved in someone like Microsoft and brought in someone like Elop.
Extremely well stated!
Nokia was going down a LONG TIME before the new CEO. Made no difference. The iPhone and Android killed them. Period.
Al's planning to fund the entire Earth Day protests in D.C. and host his other queer friends Michael E. Mann, James Hansen, John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, Timmy Cook (Failed Vice Pres. Pick of Failed Pres. Nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton) and non other than Hilly-Billy herself!
That may also be the day Trump announces the U.S.A. withdrawal from the UNFCCC-IPCC Paris Climate Accord.
Fun fun fun.
This really shows the Climate Changers are Astrologers since the Equinox is on March 20.
Buy CHK, DLNG, KOL and URA (oil, gas, coal and uranium).
Ha ha
In Indiana, they've had a record number of days in the 60s in February: https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
> How do your politicians, both left and right, so filthy rich?
In Gore's case, he wasn't filthy rich when he started. As a Senator, he sponsored a law forcing companies to buy something called "carbon credits" (pieces of paper) from another company called an "exchange". Guess who owned the exchange? Before that, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars, his carbon exchange made hundreds of millions by legally forcing people to buy his product.
You might ask how he got away with that. The key is, the whole time he whined about "big business" and polar bears. As long as a politician whines about big bad business people, they're allowed to do whatever they want.
I joked that politicians can do anything they want as long as they complain about big business while they do it.
The more serious explanation, I think, is that most Americans just pick a party or politician as their "team", then move on to other things. Most don't spend a lot of time, or have the inclination, to carefully watch what "their" politicians do after they are elected. Their attention span is just long enough to root for their favorite team/player, not enough to actually see what the politician is doing. So whoever originally decided they like Hillary, or Trump, or Gore, is unlikely to later hold them accountable for their actions. Once a majority of Americans "like" you, once they are rooting for you, you can do whatever you want with little consequences.
Why is no one mentioning this is how our corrupt power structure works? If a prime minister in Russia or South America becomes rich we all raise our eyebrows. Not with Al Gore! The nobler the cause the bigger the corruption.
GORE 2020! O.o
Ok, you made the claim. You said Snopes is "quite" biased. Prove it.
Payoff for work well done - guess the Apple programmers really dig his Al Gore Rhythm.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> Why the did this I have no idea. Panic? Bribes? Stupidity?
Maybe he has some new investment to make that is likely to result in a higher level of return? Maybe it's a green energy project he wants to invest in? Or an endowment for climate change research (he's not getting any younger so might want to set this up while he still has chance to be on a disbursement committee)?
Many reasonable options are also possible, depending on what your priorities are, which may or may not be personal financial gain. We might find out eventually. Some times it can be several reasons at once.
This is a nice textbook version of what a board should do, but this is not nearly all of what boards do. It's also a very simplified version of what went wrong at Nokia, which started well before Elop (he historically terrible anyway).
Yes, you need the board to give advice and help steer a company, but there are a LOT of other ways you can get that advice. You have a limited number of board seats to fill, so each seat necessarily does more than just give advice. The strategy of how to approach these various technical and business challenges is being developed and vetted by different people than the board.
Each board member is there to also do something else such as provide voting support for management or certain investors, provide important connections, provide credibility that would otherwise be lacking, etc. Selecting the CEO of the company is going to fall to a small subset of the board with experience in that area (not Gore's strength). It is normal to see politicians on boards, particularly when company strategy depends significantly on government actions.
From one point of view, it is... disappointing that politicians are so highly compensated to represent companies. That's probably due to the mythology we have built around our greatest politicians.
From another point of view, there are a very limited set of people who can provide the kind of insight into the way government works, and the kind of credibility in interactions with the government that Al Gore can provide. There is real value in those skills, and it seems there are not many people who compete at Gore's level. Logically, we should want our companies and our government to work well together and understand each other.
"Most don't spend a lot of time, or have the inclination, to carefully watch what "their" politicians do after they are elected."
I know! That's why all elected officials should be wearing body cams with audio 24/7 with the feed live-uploaded where anyone can tune in at any time! Can I have my billion dollar consulting check now?
I'm going to mention one clear example of what I'm talking about. This isn't at all limited to one party, I'm just going to use Hillary's name as an example:
Many of us have probably seen video clips where someone goes to a political rally or whatever and asks people who are holding signs with a politician's name, or wearing a "Hillary" shirt, a question something like this:
"Hillary is very experienced, she's been involved in politics for 30 years; what's something she's done that you like?"
Of course the answer, from someone holding a "Hillary for President" sign, is something like this:
Person holding sign: 30 years? ... She supports women!
Interviewer: Yes. What do you like that she's done?
Person holding sign: Oh uhm
Interviewer: Yeah, okay. What's something she's done to support women?
Person holding sign: Um
Interviewer: Like when she supported Paula Jones, that was good, right?
Person holding sign: Yeah, she supported Paul and Joan.
That's typical, it seems. Not just Clinton supporters, but Trump supporters too, a majority of the country can't even name the vice president.
Thanks for the link. The 1% are all deception, all the time. If a big lie doesn't work, back it up with an even bigger one.
BTW, I'd love to hear why you were modded -1.
Some fake-news libs seem to think that if your aren't picked for boards it shows you're selfish. Wow, what crap that is. It's actually the reverse of that. Why would anybody pick Algore to be on their board, I mean besides pay back. Look for "Her" to be on some boards in the future.
(http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Trump-s-lack-of-board-service-may-explain-10863402.php)
"Unlike many corporate leaders today, Trump has never served on a companyâ(TM)s board of directors other than his own. In other words, Trump has only been really responsible for one shareholder: himself."
I get this all the time.
When I do, I hit mother fuckers like you with eight links from other fact-checking sites that support the same position as snopes.
So fuck you.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
a seat on the board at Apple.
Oh, wait, no... like a typical corrupt politician Al was given a spot on a corporate board as a favor to the Democrat party establishment which lets him cash-out eventually and make tons of money for no work and with no particular education or expertise in the business of the business.
Progressives still think this guy is a "man of the people" with ethics and vision, etc.
Sorry, he's just a typical evil corrupt political skunk being given piles of money by mega-corporations who are buying influence.
I hear Google are investing a lot in AI these days.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You call out Snopes for being biased, then link to EthicsAlarms??
I see irony is lost on you.
This is a nice textbook version of what a board should do, but this is not nearly all of what boards do. It's also a very simplified version of what went wrong at Nokia, which started well before Elop (he historically terrible anyway).
I'm really sorry that I summarised and simplified in a Slashdot commment where normally I should have included a 1500 word essay on the details of what went wrong to clarify my point. What you are missing here is that things are always going wrong in big companies. The entire point of being a big company with a long term position is that you can completely mess up strategically and still get back in the game. Consider for example Microsoft's attempt to avoid IP networking entirely. They spent years trying to build an alternative which would exclude rivals. If they were a small company their product would be irrelevant, Microsoft would be dead by now. However, because Windows was dominant and had a huge eco-system other small companies connected it to IP networks. Because Microsoft was huge, they could continue NetBEUI and still have enough energy to work on integrating IP networking to Windows. Looked at from outside Microsoft had missed the boat. Looked at from almost every division inside Microsoft, they were losing a fight to defeat IP networking.
Looked at from the group writing and building the IP networking system in Microsoft, you were in a special position of being totally dominant in the market ans so you knew your IP product could succeed if it just worked. This was despite the fact that the IP code authors were doing so badly they had to rely on BSD code to get their product working.
The boards job was to realise this and find someone who was able to pursue all of the main strategies. Android, Meego, extended and simplified touch screen Symbian and maybe even Windows phone then see which one gets actual clear market traction and only then gradually kill the others. Most important, you probably needed someone with experience from a situation like in IBM where the PC division had to fight very hard for their independence which caused long term bad implications. Making sure that the Symbian people stopped interfering with other divisions and concentrated on improving their own product was completely obvious, critical and apparently being ignored. It could have been achieved with one simple change of reporting lines.
years! That might be pretty quick in geological time, but for most people it doesn't prompt quick action. If you want to sell your prime beachfront property for a big discount because you are convinced global warming will put it under water, I doubt you would find there is a big lack of interested parties.
He needs funding for his POTUS run.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2016/07/31/bye-bye-snopes-youre-dead-to-me-now/
Plenty of evidence that they produce lots of partisan garbage.
You know you are in trouble when you have to quote a site by a self-proclaimed ethicist (who just happens to be a lawyer). Especially when that ethicist has to use selective quotes to come to his conclusion.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.