What are Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg up to? US billionaires sell $11 billion in stock (2024)

American billionaires are selling stocks and not in small numbers at all. So what has happened in the past few days? Apollo Global Management's Leon Black enacted his first-ever sale after 34 years shedding $172.8 million in his equity firm. Walmart's Walton family sold $1.5billion in a week. In final two months of 2023, Mark Zuckerberg sold nearly half a billion dollars of Meta Platforms Inc. shares. Jeff Bezos sold another 14 million Amazon shares, worth around $2.4billion bringing the total number of shares he has sold in the firm to about 50 million.

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Experts do not see this as a good sign as they said that this could be because of looming US presidential elections this year. Finance firm consultant Alan Johnson told Fortune last month, 'If you're reading the tea leaves and looking at what may happen with our politics in the next year or so, things are pretty good right now - the markets are up. With our politics and everything else going on geopolitically, maybe it won't be as good a year from now or two years from now."

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This coms as S&P 500 has risen more than 27 per cent in the past year adding billions to the portfolios of billionaires. So the stockholders could be taking advantage of current tax breaks which were brought during the Donald Trump administration, the expert said.

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But some financial market players believe that this stock dump reflects something larger behind the scenes. American Hartford Gold, a company that shills gold and other metals to investors, said that large liquidations may be a sign of an impending economic dip as Senior Director Mechi Block said that these CEOs were “getting out before the tech bubble bursts”.

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"Billionaire CEOs like [Jeff] Bezos, [Mark] Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, and the Walton family are selling off massive amounts of their own stocks, and analysts think the CEOS may be bracing for an economic downturn," he said, adding, “An overheated stock market continues to climb to new heights as investors feed that frenzy out of fear of missing out, economic insiders are unloading billions of dollars worth of stocks.”

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“Meta stock has soared 186 percent, JPMorgan is up nearly 30 percent, and Amazon has actually surged close to 90 percent. All three companies are trading close to record highs,” he explained, adding, “Typically if CEOs are buying shares, it shows a confidence in the future growth potential of that company. It is also possible these billionaire's view from above could be giving them a different perspective of the economy, and where it's headed.”

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• Mark Zuckerberg
• Jeff Bezos
• Global Stock Markets