By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Blackstone stock (NYSE:BX) traded 3.5% lower in Wednesday’s premarket as the company revealed a sale of shares by Hamilton E. James, its executive vice chairman.
James sold 3.71 million shares of the private equity giant for around $500 million. The sale constitutes around 0.3% of the company's equity.
According to the company’s statement to the SEC, James has attributed the transactions to family trusts which sold them for his heirs for estate planning and necessary diversification.
Of his personal Blackstone shares held outside those trusts, he is selling only enough shares to partially fund the taxes owed on the exchange and is retaining 80% of his personal shares of the company, the statement said.
James wants to remain a long-term Blackstone shareholder, the statement noted.
James joins a long list of CEOs and Fortune 500 executives including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk who have used the record highs in the stock market to liquidate part of their holdings for various reasons in recent months.