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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!
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.
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'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.
So when he acquired them they were worth ~ $500 ... and sold for ~$136. Must have read that wrong, yeah?
Pst. I'll let you in on a secret Wallstreet doesn't want you to know about: It's called a 7:1 stock split.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.
regardless of whether or not this was the optimal time to sell, you can't buy groceries with stocks. Gotta cash out at some point. He's just decided he's ready to quit growing his money and start spending it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Financial acumen? Gore got rich the same way Clinton did: by translating his political power, political advocacy, and connections into money.
If you get rich legally before you enter politics, that shows that you can succeed by producing stuff people want. If you get rich after you leave high government office, it strongly suggests that you are a corrupt fraud. Gore clearly did the latter.
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.