Adventurer173

Why do you think it’s ok that you sold GPRO stock before all of your employees? You weren’t allowed to sell shares before December 2014, but you paid JP Morgan a hefty fee to give you a special exemption which they did, and you sold shares in October tanking the stock before anyone else could sell it. Stock was down 25% from the $85 price you sold before anyone else could touch it, and is now worth less than 1/5th it was when you sold. And don’t say it’s because it was a charitable gift, the “Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation” you created for this purpose gave away 0 dollars in those 2 months you FRONT RAN employees with no plans in place for giving and being a legitimate charity. You gave yourself a Trump level tax exemption where you’ll never have to pay taxes again, profiting hundreds of millions of dollars from this “charitable donation”. Please explain yourself.

But how much have you paid JPMorgan in fees already? I’d guess over $5 million, more than enough for them to justify giving a freebie on this one. It doesn’t feel like you confidently held onto your stock, since you “gifted” or sold over 3x the value you currently own. If you didn’t sell a share until after the lockup period expired, and don’t get credit for giving $1/2 billion dollars then that’s a very good argument. But I doubt that’s true considering the lengths you went to set this up, and the trading volume that day. I believe you that you’re confident in your company’s future, and a buyer of stock down here at $17, but before that you took advantage of a finance loophole that allowed you to cheese out of shares early to the detriment of your shareholders and valued employees.

Here's how CNN put it. Woodman's charity was created timely for the purpose to bypass rules and sell shares http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/02/investing/gopro-charity-shares/ and in response to his response: 1) He already paid a multimillion dollar fee to JPMorgan covering it 2) He already "gave"/sold a ton of stock and didn't need to sell more 3) He's not buying stock, he's paying a trivial amount of money in taxes to maintain his shares

Generally stocks go up/down and it's hard to predict, but this is a unique case where he knew the true value was lower, and made hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits/tax savings.