That's a great, valid point... Still interesting to me that he unloaded almost all his vested shares. The media was sure to pick up on it and executives often buy back shares to signal confidence.
Maybe he was simply trying to balance his asset allocation. He's definitely not living off $40m, right? It always seems that Apple is sure to outperform, but maybe we'll look back on this as a genius move in a few years.
EDIT: Updated the title to richardburton's suggestion.
Frankie, apologies, I didn't mean to suggest that you were responsible for the link-baited titles. Your title correctly reflects the sentiment of the reporting across the board:
"An Apple CEO-in-waiting sells 95% of his company shares"
I am heavily invested in Apple and so I follow them very closely. Data from Asymco gives me even greater confidence in their performance:
Exactly.. and Tim Cook has sold lots of his vested shares in April as well. And he does so every time he gets a new portion. And he did that for years, even when AAPL was $150, $250, $350.. (just a year ago).
While insider buying is a very strong and clear signal, insider selling happens regularly even at the most successful of companies. Just for reasons of diversification, it's reasonable even for extremely bullish founders or upper management to sell their shares. Buffet was an outlier in his multi-decade practice of keeping over 99% of his wealth in his company's stock.
Scott Forstall sells 95% of his vested AAPL shares
With a subtitle:
... because he's in line to get 5x more shares in the future
He sold 64,151 shares but by 2016 he will have 250,000 restricted stock units that are vested.