Stock sales by high-ranking DraftKings executives (NASDAQ: DKNG) continue at a brisk pace with co-founders Paul Liberman and Jason Robins disposing of more than $10 million worth of the gaming company’s shares in less than a week.
In a Form 144 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Boston-based gaming company told the commission that CEO Robins sold 20K shares of stock on August 21 for gross proceeds of $6.96 million. Fellow co-founder and President of Product Liberman dumped 88,441 shares on Monday for gross proceeds of $3.23 million, according to a separate regulatory filing. Both transactions were exercises of stock options.
The sales by Liberman and Robins arrived just weeks after DraftKings announced its first-ever share repurchase program — one that could see the online sportsbook operator buy back up to $1 billion of its stock — and as social media scrutiny of insider selling at the gaming company intensifies. Liberman and Robins along with fellow co-founder Matt Kalish and other DraftKings insiders have been devoted sellers of the stock in the more than four years since the company became a standalone publicly traded entity.
Conversely, there’s been little evidence over that time of insider buying at the company. Kalish, Liberman, and Robins each have a $1 annual salary. However, they are heavily compensated in equity and are frequent sellers of shares of the company they founded.
Not Robins’ Only Recent Sales of DraftKings Stock
The August 21 sale wasn’t the only of late by Robins. According to the SEC, the DraftKings CEO sold 20K shares on August 8 for gross proceeds of $6.14 million. That was preceded by the sale of another 20K shares on May 21 for $8.78 million in gross proceeds.
From late January through early February, Lieberman, Robins, and General Counsel Stanton Dodge sold $78.76 million worth of DraftKings equity in the days leading up to the operator’s fourth-quarter earnings report.
A significant amount of the sales by DraftKings insiders are via automated trading plans, and it’s common for many emerging growth companies — of which the sportsbook operator is one — to use equity as a form of compensation.
However, the rampant insider selling at the gaming company, particularly when considering there’s been scant buying, contradicts statements made by Robins in 2022. In March of that year, he took to X (then Twitter) to tell investors who were selling DraftKings stock at that time that they’d ultimately regret that decision.
Some Rivals Do Things Differently
DraftKings isn’t alone when it comes to heavy insider selling in the online gaming industry. For example, some investors have recently criticized similar moves by executives at Rush Street Interactive (NYSE: RSI), itself a young emerging-growth company.
Equity compensation for high-ranking executives is commonplace in a variety of industries. Thus, so is insider selling, but some companies are more restrained in their approaches to lavishing stock options upon their leaders.
Flutter Entertainment’s (NYSE: FLUT) recently published annual report indicates that CEO Peter Jackson will be paid a salary of $1.39 million for the upcoming fiscal year with a maximum bonus of 400% of that figure. Said another way, Jackson’s maximum compensation for the upcoming year will be $6.95 million, or $100K less than the amount of DraftKings stock Robins sold last week.
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