Twitter Inc (TWTR) COO Rowghani, Others Sell As Lockup Expires

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Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) shares plunged heavily on Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing down the stock to an all-time low of $29.51. The heavy sell-off began when lockup on inside sales was lifted. Tuesday, May 6 was the first day early investors and the company employees could freely offload their holdings. Regulatory filings show that Twitter chief operating officer Ali Rowghani, sometimes called Mr. Fix-It, was among the executives who offloaded their holdings.

Twitter’s No.2 executive among the first to sell shares

Rowghani said in his regulatory filing Thursday that he exercised 300K stock options at 84 cents each. He then sold those share at $33.76, raking in close to $9.9 million. Rowghani still owns about 990,000 Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) shares. General counsel Vijaya Gadde said in her filing that she offloaded 13,346 shares at $33.77 apiece for a profit of about $451,000. Gadde now owns 848,000 shares of the company.

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)’s VP for finance Luca Baratta sold 9,285 share for a relatively low $31.44 on Tuesday, according to his filing. Baratta took net proceeds of about $292,000. He now holds 331,904 shares of the microblogging company. But the San Francisco-based company’s largest shareholder, Rizvi Traverse Management made some mysterious filings. The highly secretive fund manager owned 14.4% stake or 85 million shares of the company.

Twitter founders, CEO hold on to their shares

Rizvi Traverse Management said in its filing that it had already distributed its shares to the underlying investors. They included many Rizvi-controlled firms, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM), and Kingdom Holding, which is owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The American banking giant and Rizvi had previously signaled that they won’t unload their stakes. But some of the recipients might have chosen to cash out.

However, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams have pledged not to unload their shares to show a vote of confidence in the company. Investors have raised questions over Twitter’s future growth prospects as its user growth decelerated for two consecutive quarters.

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) shares fell 0.34% to $31.85 in early trading session Friday.

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