Spotify CFO cashes in £7.2M in shares after value surges on news of job cuts

I agree, but the last time a major company tried to fire the C-Suite, the employees mutinied...

More seriously regarding this decision in particular- I think there is an interesting and not straight forward question about whether companies should hire and fire freely, allowing for high employment at times as well as layoffs and low employment at other times (as well as risk taking), or should they be more careful and therefore have less employment when money is flowing freely and fewer layoffs when money is tight? The answer seems to be somewhere on a continuum, but different folks find a different point optimal. It seems there are successful societies built on policies promoting different answers as well.

I can't default to faulting an individual for simply making a different decision than I might have preferred they make. I don't even know how much the Spotify CFO was involved in making these decisions in this case, maybe a lot, maybe a little, maybe they were against it but were over-ruled.

> If you agree with the narrative of shareholder primacy

I've really begun to notice that there is a large group of people who see this not as a narrative but as objective and external reality. I see it often on this topic, that capitalism (definitional arguments noted) is not just inherently good - it is in fact inherent. However it seems to increasingly apply to many people's perspectives on social and societal concepts.

I love me some internet...have since I was a kid...but one externality of being able to find and interact with people who think similarly to you is increased coalescence around different realities as realities rather than narratives or perspectives.

> If you think these things aren’t fair or suck, then you should try to move out of the leet coder path and get on the capital owner or business operator side.

You could also try to improve society.

People don’t have to just take it, they can fight back. All power comes from the consent of the masses, none of these guys have the physical power to compel any of us to do anything at all, including let them live.

Look what is happening to Tesla in Scandinavia right now for an entirely different take on what people can do if they don’t think things are fair.

> He can sell his shares when he feels like it.

I thought that as a corporate officer he kind of can't sell his shares when he feels like it?

My layperson's understanding is that people like him have to decide in advance when they're going to sell shares and tell the SEC (by filing a 10b5-1 with a preset sales schedule and cooling-off period before sales start). I thought that the most control he would get is choosing to suspend the plan (i.e. keep shares instead of selling them on the pre-decided date).

Are there other ways he can sell his shares whenever he wants? Can he borrow using them as collateral whenever he likes, for example?

As a legal matter, no, he can't really sell his shares when he feels like it. (Disclaimer: IANAL and this is not advice.) The Spotify insider trading policy [1] prohibits transactions during "blackout periods," which start with the last month of the fiscal quarter (so December 1, in this case) and end after earnings are released.

These share sales were presumably executed pursuant to a 10b5-1 plan, so he did something like set up a target price ahead of time at which he would sell. It just so happened that the plan was triggered when the stock surged on news of layoffs. I don't think the optics are great there! But it's at least sort of a coincidence.

[1] https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_downloads/gov-docs...