‍

Blake, Wm. The Goddess of Fortune. 1824.

‍

High-profile CEOs, founders, and heirs are selling off stocks in massive quantities as share prices are trading near all-time highs. Analysts suspect this may be the “calm before the storm” because the election might shake things up in the fall.

This month, Jeff Bezos sold Amazon shares worth $8.5 billion and Mark Zuckerberg unloaded about 1.4 million shares of Meta stock worth roughly $638 million. The trust for the Walton family, heirs to Walmart’s founder, sold $1.5 billion in Walmart stock, owning about 45% of Walmart’s shares.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sold $150 million in stock last week, his first cashing out since taking the position 18 years ago. Leon Black, co-founder of Apollo Global Management, has sold $172.8 million in stock, another first-ever stock sale.

Alan Johnson, president of Johnson Associates: “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.”