This CEO Has Purchased Over $1 Billion Worth Of His Own Stock Over The Last Year

Dustin Moskovitz was one of the co-founders of Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB), along with Mark Zuckerberg. He helped launch the site in 2004 while they were both still students at Harvard.

After the social network – formerly Facebook – became a huge success, Moskovitz left to start in 2008 his own company, Asana Inc (NYSE:ASAN) with Justin Rosenstein.

Asana’s objective as a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) company was simple: to provide a mobile work platform focused on helping businesses manage their workflow within the 21st century workplace. Moskovitz’s vision was realized with the Covid-19 pandemic which led to the rise of many things, including forcing a large segment of the global workforce to go through a remote-work experiment on a scale never seen before.

Asana, like a lot of other SaaS companies, experienced strong demand across the customer base for its products and the company’s stock price soared.

The San Francisco-based company IPOd on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in Oct. 2020. The stock rocketed from around $27 a share when it opened, which was 22% above NYSE’s $21 reference price, to more than $140 a share on Dec. 2021, a gain of more than 430%.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. In what’s likely the most aggressive run in insider stock buying ever, in June 2021, Moskovitz began to add to his position in Asana. He first bought 50K shares for nearly $20 million for an average price of $39.49 apiece. Two weeks later he increased his holdings by purchasing an additional 410K shares for an average price of $42.35 per share.

Altogether, Moskovitz now owns more than 16.5 million shares of Asana’s class A stock, bringing his total spending to $1.02 billion, good for a stake of about 21%.

It goes without saying that Moskovitz’s investments are probably the most aggressive run of insider buying in history. That said, he certainly can afford it.

Moskovitz is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world with a net worth of about $13 billion. He is still a major investor in Meta with an estimated 2% stake.

Price Action

ASAN was 24% down in early trading on Thursday to $37.11 and has now tumbled 34.53% year-to-date. By comparison, the S&P 500 has lost 10.25 during the same period.