On a near-daily basis, billionaire entrepreneur Jensen Huang is selling hundreds of thousands of shares in his company, Nvidia.
Huang’s selloff strategy was put in place in early spring, and it has meant the CEO avoided being hit as hard now the value of his chip-maker company has begun to fall.
For example, in late June Nvidia’s shares sat pretty as the darling of Wall Street, valued at approximately $124 a share.
In July, this leapt to a near-all-time high of $134. 91, before beginning to dip in the second half of the month. Currently, Nvidia shares are down to approximately $100—a benchmark it last reached in May of this year.
But Huang’s portfolio strategy meant he began selling his equity in regular blocks of 120,000 shares each when the company’s price was high.
In July alone Huang offloaded approximately $323 million in Nvidia stock—and near $361 million if one counts the first week of August.
Huang also sold his usual 120,000 shares the day Nvidia’s share price hit an all-time high of $135.58 in June, when the market value of the sale hit $16.08 million per an SEC filing seen by Fortune.
However, across some 25 SEC filings viewed by Fortune between early July and the time of writing, the values of sales of these blocks of 120,000 shares oscillated anywhere between $11.98 million and $16.09 million.
From July to the time of writing, the average value of Huang’s daily sale was $14.44 million.
Nvidia declined to comment when reached by Fortune.
World’s richest lost $134 billion
While Huang’s timing is fortuitous in some aspects, it was laid out well in advance of any fluctuations in Nvidia’s stock price.
A regulatory filing seen by Fortune reveals that Huang announced he had a Rule 10b5-1 trading agreement on March 14, with sales possible through to March 31, 2025.
The arrangement means executives like Huang—and any other business insiders—buy or sell their company stock on a predetermined schedule without violating insider trading laws.
Huang wasn’t the only Nvidia exec to confirm a Rule 10b5-1 trading agreement in the April filing.
Debora Shoquist, executive vice president of operations, Colette M. Kress, executive vice president and CFO, and Ajay K. Puri, executive vice president of worldwide field operations also disclosed they similar plans.
And while the offload of Huang’s stocks are worth millions on a daily basis, that hasn’t insulated the CEO entirely from the faltering of the market in recent weeks.
At the peak of his net worth in June—corresponding with Nvidia’s share price peak—Huang was worth $119 billion per the Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Less than two months later that net worth has fallen to $88.4 billion, placing him at 15th on the world’s richest rankings.
That said, the bulk of Huang’s worth is still made up of shares in the California-based chip giant he worked tirelessly to build. Huang still owns approximately 3.5% of the company.
Every high-profile name among the world’s richest currently has a red mark beside it, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all take a hit to their fortunes amid volatility in the markets.
The world’s 500 richest people saw at least $134 billion wiped from their fortunes overnight after upset in the markets prompted by a less-than-positive labor report Friday.
The Nasdaq 100 Index fell 2.4% on the final day of trading last week, dragging down the net worth of all 10 of the richest people in the world by at least $1 billion per Bloomberg’s calculations.
Experts at the Futurum Group—a tech industry research and advisory firm—told the Financial Times the bearishness is likely just a rotation out of sectors which have performed well over the course of the year, as opposed to anything relating to Nvidia’s fundamentals.
“We’ve seen money flow out of Big Tech mostly, I think, because they have had an incredible run-up,” CEO Daniel Newman said, “and that, of course, gave room for a little bit of a selloff.”
