Palantir cofounder Cohen sells over 20% of his stake in planned sale
Palantir cofounder and director Stephen Cohen sold shares worth more than $310 million over three days last week, as part of a trading plan adopted in December.
After a couple days of solid gains, Palantir is once again among the large-cap laggards putting downward pressure on the blue-chip S&P 500 index Tuesday.
There’s little fundamental news on the stock, though eagle-eyed equity analyst Brent Thill over at Jefferies spotlights more selling of the stock by company insiders. (Thill was one of the first to take note of a surge of selling by cofounder and CEO Alex Karp over the past year that reduced his holdings in the data analytics software company by 20%.)
Not to be outdone, Stephen Cohen, Palantir cofounder as well as president, secretary, and board member, sold more than 20% of his stake in the company over three days last week, according to Thill:
“We highlight a resumption of PLTR’s insider selling via Rule 10b5-1 trading plans in 2025, with co-founder and President Stephen Cohen selling $310M worth of shares over the last few days (~23% of his overall stake in PLTR).”
To be sure, the company signaled that some selling could be coming, writing in its annual report that Cohen had established new trading plans that would allow him to sell more than 4 million shares through September, without running afoul of Rule 10b5-1, the SEC rule on insider trading. (Karp also disclosed new stock-selling plans.)
Cohen’s sales last week represented the exercise of options for 3.75 million shares, which he immediately sold.
What’s to be made of all this selling? As we’ve said before, there are all sorts of reasons why insiders sell. So it’s a bit of a stretch to make these sales out to be a sign of things to come for Palantir shares.
After all, Cohen also dumped nearly 4 million shares in conjunction with the company’s IPO on September 30, 2020, generating proceeds of about $38 million.
That’s not a bad day’s work. But if he’d held onto that pile of stock, it would be worth more than $330 million now. According to FactSet data, Cohen has sold stock worth more than $750 million since the company went public. Karp has sold more than $3 billion worth.
