Meta (Nasdaq:META) executives and directors have unloaded roughly $130 million of company stock over the past six months. Across the same half year, they have bought exactly zero shares.
That selling might have been more palatable if they had, as executives and directors, helped the stock price go up over that time period. They did not.
META, trading on the Nasdaq, is worth less today than it was six months ago.
Worse, their stock sales clustered near the higher range of 2026, months before an AI spending spree knocked the stock down. Since the start of the year, the company has lost $60 billion in market capitalization.
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The heaviest seller was Chief Financial Officer Susan Li. Her Form 4 disclosures show about $95 million in sales.
Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan also sold more than $22 million in smaller lots. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth accounted for nearly $10 million more.
Directors Robert Kimmitt and Peggy Alford, plus Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney, contributed to the selling pressure. Conspicuously absent was anyone buying on the open market.
Lots of sales ahead of Meta’s bad earnings
Meta executives and directors filed 86 Form 4s with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since January, and those documents carry more than 300 individual transaction lines. Transactions include option exercises, tax-withholding events, and stock awards, which are routine disclosures about executive compensation. Unfortunately, more than half of the transactions relate to open-market sales.
Meta reported Q1 results on April 29 and, on paper, knocked it out of the park. Revenue rose 33% to $56.3 billion. Earnings were $10.44 per share, but that figure was inflated by a one-time tax benefit.
Stripped of that, adjusted earnings were far lower at $7.31 per share.
Investors saw a company burning cash on AI faster than it could generate profit. Shares dropped more than 8% the day after earnings, their worst single session of the year.
Capital expenditures (CapEx) on AI, like CapEx on Meta’s deca-billion dollar metaverse initiative that went nowhere, may become a big problem.
Meta raised its 2026 CapEx guidance to as much as $145 billion, up from a prior ceiling of $135 billion. If it spends that, it will double the $72 billion it spent in 2025.
Li attributed the raise to AI-related shortages: “Higher component pricing this year and, to a lesser extent, additional data center costs to support future year capacity.”
Down 20% since August 15
Meta has fallen from an August 2025 peak of $796 to under $632 at yesterday’s close, a decline of 20%.
The stock bottomed near $520 in late March. Susan Li’s biggest sales landed in February above $630 — weeks before that slide began.
Insider selling, on its own, is not enough evidence to forecast the price of any particular stock. Executives sell to support their families, housing, taxes, diversification, or a variety of pre-planned purposes. Most sales are scheduled under plans that strip out discretion regarding timing.
Still, insiders sold at Meta, and none of them bought. As Peter Lynch taught the world, “Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise.”
Meta’s insiders in six months had over 300 transaction disclosures to place one bullish bet with their own money. Over that stretch they took roughly $130 million off the table and put nothing back on.
