Insiders at nine US AI companies sold $7.39 billion of stock across 282 SEC Form 4 filings from May through October, according to a Protos tally published on 6 November. Nvidia director Mark Stevens alone sold 6,121,740 Nvidia shares for $1.35 billion in five Form 4 filings over the same months, by our count of his filings on SEC EDGAR.
We checked six of the sellers Protos names against their own Form 4s: together they sold $2.37 billion, 32.1% of the Protos total. At the official 5 November closes, the same shares would be worth $1.88 billion, $488.6 million or 20.6% less, by our arithmetic. Five of the six sellers’ filings are marked as sales under Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, which are arranged in advance; Stevens’s are not.
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The key insight: As we read it, six of the insiders Protos names sold $2.37 billion of stock from May to October in their own Form 4s, 32.1% of the $7.39 billion Protos counted; at the 5 November closes the same shares would be worth $488.6 million less, by our arithmetic. Nvidia director Mark Stevens accounts for $1.35 billion of the six.
Protos writes: “Across 282 SEC Form 4s from May through October, insiders at nine US AI companies cashed out $7.39 billion. Excluding $179 million in tax-related sales, discretionary exits still exceeded $7.2 billion across 243 filings.” It lists the companies as Nvidia, Oracle, Micron, Broadcom, AMD, SanDisk, CoreWeave, Arista and Astera Labs.
Protos also says the PHLX Semiconductor Sector index “has crashed 32% since its October high” and that on Thursday “US-listed stocks shed $3.2 trillion in market capitalization in a single trading session”. We did not rebuild the full 282-filing count; the six totals below are from our own reading of the filings.
Open-market sales (Form 4 transaction code S) by six AI-company insiders in Form 4s filed on SEC EDGAR from 1 May to 31 October 2026, summed by FourWeekMBA; shares withheld for tax are excluded. The six are among the sellers named by Protos on 6 November 2026.
Six Sellers, Checked Against Their Filings
Summing the open-market sales (transaction code S) in each person’s Form 4s filed from 1 May to 31 October, and excluding shares withheld for tax, we get: Mark Stevens, Nvidia director, $1,353.7 million for 6,121,740 shares; Henry Samueli, Broadcom co-founder, $500.0 million for 1,356,431 shares; Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron chief executive, $182.3 million for 200,000 shares; Lisa Su, AMD chief executive, $168.6 million for 360,000 shares; David Goeckeler, SanDisk chief executive, $105.0 million for 67,679 shares; and Jeffrey Henley, Oracle vice chairman, $63.7 million for 400,000 shares.
Our figures match the ones Protos gives for Stevens’s June sales ($407 million), Su ($169 million), Mehrotra ($182 million), Goeckeler ($105 million) and Henley ($63.7 million). Protos cites $750 million for Samueli for all of 2026; his two Form 4s in our May-to-October window total $500.0 million.
What the Same Shares Are Worth Now
Stevens sold at an average of about $221 a share across the five filings, by our arithmetic. Nvidia closed at $181.60 on 5 November, according to Nasdaq, which puts the same 6,121,740 shares at $1,111.7 million, $242.0 million below what the sales raised. For all six, the shares would be worth $1,884.7 million at the 5 November closes against $2,373.3 million raised, a gap of $488.6 million, or 20.6%. SanDisk shows the widest gap: Goeckeler sold at an average of about $1,551 a share against a $806.43 close, 48.0% lower.
The Trading-Plan Box
Each Form 4 has a box that the filer ticks when a transaction was made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, a pre-arranged schedule that is set up before the sales take place. The sale filings for Samueli, Mehrotra, Su, Goeckeler and Henley in this window tick that box. None of Stevens’s five sale filings ticks it; the filings describe sales by trusts of which he is a trustee.
An unticked box records how the sale was reported; on its own it says nothing about the reason for a sale, and nothing in these filings links any sale to the November selloff.
As we read the filings, the six totals are concentrated: one Nvidia director sold more than the other five combined.
As we read the Form 4s, five of the six sellers marked their sales as made under Rule 10b5-1 plans, which are set in advance; the filings record that, and say nothing about the reason for any sale.
As we read the closing prices, the 20.6% gap measures how far these stocks fell after the sales, not any seller’s gain or loss.
Protos, 6 November 2026
“Across 282 SEC Form 4s from May through October, insiders at nine US AI companies cashed out $7.39 billion”
Three Implications
FOR NVIDIA SHAREHOLDERS The largest seller in our six-person sample is an Nvidia director, with $1.35 billion across five Form 4s, by our count.
FOR READERS OF INSIDER DATA Protos excludes $179 million of tax-related sales from its discretionary figure; we excluded tax withholding from our sums too.
FOR THE AI TRADE Protos says the PHLX Semiconductor Sector index has fallen 32% since its October high.
The analysis says: “Conflating these clocks produces the most common analytical errors of the moment.”
As we read it, insider sales and market prices in this piece run on different clocks: the sales were filed over six months, the price fall took days. The analysis does not discuss these insiders or their sales.
What Is Not Established
We did not recount all 282 filings in the Protos tally, so the $7.39 billion total and the nine-company list are Protos’s figures. We did not check sellers at CoreWeave, Arista or Astera Labs. The values at the 5 November closes, the 32.1% share and the gaps are our arithmetic; they compare sale proceeds with a later market price and do not measure any seller’s gain or loss. We did not contact the companies or the insiders.
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Insiders at nine AI companies sold $7.39 billion of stock from May through October, by Protos’s count. Six of the named sellers account for $2.37 billion in their own Form 4s, led in our sample by Nvidia director Mark Stevens at $1.35 billion. At the 5 November closes, the shares those six sold would be worth $488.6 million less.
A note on sourcing. The $7.39 billion total, the 282 filings and the nine-company list are from Protos (6 November 2026). The six individual totals are our own sums of open-market sales (transaction code S) in each person’s Form 4s on SEC EDGAR filed from 1 May to 31 October 2026, excluding tax withholding, read on 6 November. Closing prices are Nasdaq’s official 5 November closes. Values at those closes and all percentages are our arithmetic. We did not contact the companies or the insiders.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
