Insiders out: Bezos, others cash in chips

Amazon.com Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos joined a growing conga line of US corporate insiders earlier this month when he sold 932,811 of his 89 million company shares — pocketing a cool $152 million.

The sale brought his total 2010 sales of Amazon stock to 6 million shares and his take to $792 million.

That can buy a lot of Kindles.

Bezos is far from the only corporate insider cashing in.

In fact, with the stock markets rallying since Sept. 1 and with the possibility that capital gains taxes and income taxes could jump next year, executives and directors have cashed out nearly $23 billion of stock and options so far this year — a pace nearly four times faster than during the dark days of the 2008 recession, says a new report.

“The volume of insider transactions has increased dramatically over the past three weeks,” said Ben Silverman, director of research at InsiderScore.com, which tracks sales of securities held by corporate insiders.

He said the past two weeks alone showed an abrupt “flood. . . and magnitude of insider selling due to the fact that the market hit a two-year high, and that the tax rate on capital gains could increase next year.”

Among recent big windfalls in 2010 were $1.84 billion for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, $1.34 billion for his CEO Steve Ballmer and $1.13 billion for Larry Ellison, head of Oracle.

In all, the number of transactions involving stocks and options for all executives and directors soared to 958 through early November from a total 268 during 2008, the slowest year in the past decade.

For CEOs alone, their cash-outs climbed to 178 thus far in 2010 from 77 in 2008. CFOs made 82 transactions so far in 2010, compared with just 19 in 2008. The bulk of cash-outs this year — 73 percent — came from middle management and directors, the report said.