You think they just suddenly came up with this model? No shit they have to jump through hoops. That doesn't stop them from doing it in advance of something like this
Not that scumbag ceos wouldn't do such a thing, but doesn't appear to be the case here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/
Anyways, investors love this subscription model recurring revenue junk, makes sense that if anything their stock price has risen from this announcement. We'll see how it pans out in the long term though.
It's hard to say sometimes, announcement was yesterday morning and it didn't budge it much (when I originally made comment stocks had not yet opened for today). It could also be related to the consumer price index showing an inflation uptick this morning compared to July, raising concerns for more rate increases. That report was just released this morning so seems a more likely cause for a change today.That tends to hit faster growing tech companies with poor p/e ratios like unity. There are other companies with the same pattern today, and the drop around the same time. Maybe you could argue the backlash wasn't felt until overnight or something? But it's the stock market, no one can really say for sure.
Not that insider trading and things aren't huge problems, but a ceo who's paid in stock and has regular planned in advance sales of that stock doesn't seem quite the conspiracy to me in this specific case. This was another single 2,000 sale, small in comparison to the 50,000 shares sold so far this year alone for this guy. Ceos often have pay and bonuses tied directly to share price, so the idea they would force a policy they thought would lose money in a conspiracy to tank the share price all to sell another 4% of the total amount of stock he's sold this year at a 5% profit when he could just, not do that, and sell the stock anyways, seems like a huge stretch for me.
Like I don't understand what the conspiracy is supposed to be, ceo decides to tank company shares on purpose for no reason and then sells stock in advance? Why didn't ceo just decide not to tank company shares and continue to make lots more money instead? Presumably they thought this would increase their revenue and profits and therefore stock prices and were hoping it would be popular with investors. Like if he thought it would tank stock prices, the way to make more money would be just not to do it. Now if it's something like, unity ceo had advance knowledge of an earnings report miss and sold a bunch of shares under the table before the report was public, now that's insider trading and a big problem. Or unity ceo shorted hundreds of thousands of company shares and then tanked company on purpose. Anyways, this whole story just seems like uninformed click bait. Save the outrage for unity's decision to hurt game developers.
Depending on how long the backlash can stick around, I would expect to see it go down with a large exodus. In particular, if Microsoft gets upset about the impact it could have to gamepass. Unity does seem to be backtracking, but it really feels like they overextended on purpose to make the actual result feel less shitty