Dustin Moskovitz, Asana co-founder and chief executive officer.
Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images
Asana shares continued to ratchet higher as Dustin Moskovitz, the project management software company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, extends his unprecedented run of purchases of Asana stock.
As Barron’s noted last week, Moskovitz bought $1.02 billion of Asana (ticker: ASAN) stock from mid-June through Feb. 2, a buying spree that might be the single-largest run of insider stock buying in history. Ben Silverman, director of research at InsiderScore, which tracks stock activity from corporate insiders, last week said it appears to be the first time a single insider has bought $1 billion worth of stock in a non-buyout scenario. The firm’s data go back to 2004.
Fresh data show that Moskovitz has picked up the pace of his Asana purchases in recent trading days. Over the final three days of last week, a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows, Moskovitz bought another 1.25 million Asana shares for a combined $79 million.
Moskovitz, a billionaire who also co-founded Facebook (FB), accounted for nearly 7% of the trading volume in Asana shares last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. With the additional purchases, Moskovitz has now invested $1.1 billion in his own company’s stock since June. Asana has a market cap of about $12.1 billion.
Including shares held in trust, Moskovitz now owns close to 22 million of the company’s Class A shares, or about 22.5% of the total outstanding, along with nearly 68 million of the company’s super-voting Class B shares, about 76% of the total outstanding.
According to SEC filings, all of the purchases since mid-2021 were made under a 10b5-1 trading plan, an automated program intended to keep executives from trading on insider information.
Asana has declined to comment on the stock trading activity, noting that the company is in a quiet period ahead of its earnings report on March 9.
On Monday, Asana shares have rallied 6.8% to $65.73. The stock has surged nearly 43% since Feb. 3.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
