Bezos Sold $13.6B of Amazon in 2024 — Insider Sales Top 22

The problem: Every February, financial press cycles through the same headline — "CEO X sold $Y of company stock" — usually pulled off OpenInsider or a single Form 4 filing, framed as a sentiment signal. The framing falls apart at scale. When you pull every Form 4 sale above $1 million across the 25 most-watched US public companies for an entire calendar year, the picture isn't "CEOs are bailing." It's that one person sold more than the next four combined, the most-watched insiders sold nothing, and most of what looks like tactical selling was set in motion months earlier through pre-scheduled trading plans. This is what the 2024 leaderboard actually looks like.

This post is a documentary audit of SEC Form 4 insider sale filings across calendar year 2024, sampled across 25 top US public companies. Every dollar figure links back to the SEC EDGAR filing index where it originated. The leaderboard is real, the absences are real, and the framing journalists usually slap on top is wrong.

What is SEC Form 4? A filing that corporate insiders — officers, directors, and 10%+ shareholders — must submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission within two business days of any change in their company stock holdings. Form 4 is the primary public record of insider buying, selling, option exercises, and grants for US public companies.

Why it matters: Form 4 filings are the only legally-mandated, real-time public record of insider transactions at US public companies. Every CEO sale, board director divestiture, and 10%+ shareholder reduction is filed within 48 hours and indexed by the SEC's EDGAR system. Aggregating Form 4 sales by year and company is the cleanest available read on who is and isn't divesting.

Use it when: You're building a leaderboard of who sold the most of their own company stock, tracking corporate-governance-disclosed divestitures, researching insider-cluster patterns at a specific ticker, or auditing 10b5-1 plan adoption.

Key findings

• Jeff Bezos sold $13.63 billion of Amazon stock in 2024, across 66 separate Form 4 filings.
• The next-largest individual sale (Michael Dell at $3.82B) is 3.6× smaller than Bezos's.
• Bezos's 2024 total alone exceeds the next four named individuals combined — Dell + Rob Walton + Alice Walton + Jim Walton equal $11.5B together.
• The Walton family pulled $8.30 billion out of Walmart in 2024 — three siblings plus the Walton Family Holdings Trust.
• Berkshire Hathaway as a corporate entity trimmed $10.89 billion of Bank of America across 51 filings — Buffett personally sold $0 of BRK stock.
• Three Palantir insiders sold $3.86 billion combined — Karp + Thiel + Sankar — the heaviest insider-selling cluster in the sample by market-cap intensity.
• 22 named individuals or entities sold over $200 million each of their own company's stock in 2024.
• Elon Musk, Warren Buffett personally, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin all sold below the $1M threshold in 2024 — the most-watched founders weren't the biggest sellers.
• Total sample: 2,258 individual Form 4 transactions across 25 ticker queries, captured 8 May 2026.

In this article: Top 22 leaderboard · Story A: Bezos $13.6B · Story B: Walton family · Story C: Berkshire BAC · Story D: Palantir cluster · Story E: Notable absences · Cross-company aggregations · 10b5-1 plan disclosure · Methodology · Caveats · Press lift-out

The 2024 leaderboard — top 22 individual and entity sellers

This is the full set of named insiders or filing entities that sold over $200 million of their own company's stock in calendar year 2024, across the 25 ticker sample. The leaderboard mixes individuals and corporate entities — Bezos's $13.63B is filed personally; Berkshire Hathaway's $10.89B BAC trim is filed by the corporate entity; the SLTA private-equity vehicles in the Dell rows are PE general partners liquidating fund positions. Different governance meanings, same SEC reporting surface.

Bold rows indicate sales filed personally by named individuals. Italicised rows indicate sales filed by corporate entities or private-equity vehicles. The leaderboard ranks by 2024 dollar value of insider stock sales above the $1M-per-trade threshold. Underlying source: SEC EDGAR Form 4 filings, queried via the sec-insider-trading actor on 8 May 2026.

Top 16 individual sellers (named persons only)

For headline pull-quotes that need to compare apples to apples, the leaderboard split to named-individual sellers only:

The Bezos-to-second-place gap (3.6×) is even more visible without the entity rows blurring the picture.

Top 6 entity sellers (corporate / private-equity entities)

Rows from the combined leaderboard that represent corporate entities, family trusts, or PE general partners — different governance meaning from the named-individual list:

A press lift-out using the entity table needs different framing — Berkshire's $10.89B is a Buffett-directed Berkshire-Hathaway-the-corporation decision, not Buffett-the-individual divesting his own personal holdings.

Story A — Bezos's $13.63B is in a league of its own

The next-largest individual insider sale in the sample (Michael Dell at $3.82B) is 3.6 times smaller than Bezos's 2024 total. Bezos's 2024 sales alone exceed the next four named individuals combined: Dell + Rob Walton + Alice Walton + Jim Walton total $11.50B.

The starker number: Bezos sold $0 of Amazon stock above the $1M threshold in 2023. Verified via direct SEC Form 4 query against AMZN, dateFrom=2023-01-01, dateTo=2023-12-31, transactionType=sale, minTransactionValue=1,000,000: zero records. 2024 was Bezos's first major selling activity since his 2021 round. The same pattern holds for Michael Dell, who also sold $0 of DELL above $1M in 2023 before his $3.82B 2024 total.

The cadence matters as much as the total. Bezos's 66 separate Form 4 transactions were spread steadily across calendar year 2024 — not concentrated in any single quarter, news cycle, or earnings window. That cadence is the textbook signature of a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan: a pre-scheduled, calendar-driven sale program filed months before the first trade executes. A reader who looks at "Bezos sold $13.6B in 2024" and infers tactical selling is reading the wrong signal — the plan was set in motion in 2023, and the 2024 filings are mechanical execution.

Comparable single-year individual insider sales in modern S&P 500 history are difficult to verify, but no individual on the public leaderboard maintained by OpenInsider for 2023 or 2022 came close to the $13.63B figure. Bezos's 2024 selling appears to be the largest single-year individual insider sale by an S&P 500 figure in modern history.

2023 vs 2024 year-over-year context

The 2023 baseline reruns surface a sharper story than the 2024-only data:

The collapse: 2024 was a year when previously-quiet sellers awakened (Bezos, Dell — first major sales in two-to-three years), AI-adjacent insiders ramped 5-50× (Palantir, NVIDIA), and traditional sellers pulled back (Waltons -41%). The headline is not "everyone sold more in 2024" — it is "the composition of who's selling shifted dramatically."

2023 baseline run for AMZN, WMT, PLTR, DELL, NVDA — the five highest-volume 2024 sellers. Other tickers (META, MSFT, TSLA, etc) not yet baselined; full 25-ticker 2023 backfill is queued as a follow-up.

Story B — The Walton family pulled $8.3B out of Walmart

Three Walton siblings (Rob, Alice, Jim) plus the Walton Family Holdings Trust collectively divested $8.30 billion of Walmart stock in 2024:

The three siblings' totals are nearly identical because the family files in coordinated fashion through the same underlying vehicle structure — when one Walton sells a block, the other two typically file matching transactions in the same window. This is the largest single-family insider-selling cluster in the dataset, and the Walton-family-vs-Walmart sample explains roughly a quarter of the entire 22-row leaderboard's combined dollar value. The original filings are indexed in SEC EDGAR's Walmart Form 4 history.

Story C — Berkshire trimmed $10.9B of Bank of America

Berkshire Hathaway's $10.89 billion reduction in BAC stock across 51 transactions in mid-2024 was Buffett's most-watched insider move of the year. The trades were filed by Berkshire as the corporate entity — not personally by Warren Buffett — and that distinction matters for governance interpretation. Berkshire's BAC stake reduction was a portfolio-management decision by a registered 10%+ shareholder; Bezos's $13.63B Amazon sale was a personal-balance-sheet decision by an executive.

The trades happened in concentrated bursts in mid-2024, which contrasts sharply with Bezos's steady cadence. Concentrated bursts are not, by themselves, evidence of non-10b5-1 selling — Berkshire's plans can adjust quarterly — but the burstiness combined with Buffett's general willingness to comment publicly on capital allocation makes this the single most-followed Form 4 sequence of the year.

Buffett himself sold $0 of Berkshire Hathaway stock in 2024. The personal vs corporate-entity distinction is the entire story when reading this row.

Story D — The Palantir cluster: $3.86B from three insiders

Three Palantir insiders combined to sell $3.86B of PLTR stock in 2024:

Per market cap, this is the heaviest concentrated insider-selling intensity of any company in the sample. The cluster size — three named C-suite-or-board insiders selling over $400M each — is uncommon among $200B-cap technology companies and is documented across 71 separate Palantir Form 4 filings.

PLTR's stock more than doubled in 2024 (roughly +340% year-over-year per Palantir's investor relations page), so the selling didn't depress the price. But the cluster's size is the story — three insiders divesting in a coordinated manner during a period when the company's market cap was expanding rapidly is unusual enough to deserve its own row in any 2024 retrospective.

Story E — The most-watched insiders who sold nothing

Some of the founders, CEOs, and 10%+ holders that financial press most commonly tracks for sentiment signals sold $0 above the $1M threshold in 2024:

• Elon Musk (TSLA) — $0. Musk has been on a sale freeze since late 2022; his only Form 4 activity in calendar 2024 was option exercises, not open-market sales. The detail is verifiable from Tesla's Form 4 filing history.
• Warren Buffett personally (BRK.A) — $0. Berkshire as the corporate entity sold heavily (the $10.89B BAC trim above), but Buffett's personal Form 4 activity for BRK was nil. Verified via direct query against BRK.A, dateFrom=2024-01-01, dateTo=2024-12-31, transactionType=sale, minTransactionValue=1,000: only one record above the $1,000 floor, filed by Ajit Jain (Vice Chairman of Insurance Operations), not Buffett.
• Tim Cook (AAPL) — minimal. Cook's 2024 personal-trade total was under $5 million, a sharp drop from 2023's heavier exit. Apple's Form 4 history is in SEC EDGAR's AAPL feed.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin (GOOGL) — both filed below the $1M-per-trade threshold across 2024.
• Sundar Pichai (GOOGL) — under $5M total across the year.
• Bill Gates (MSFT) — Gates files MSFT sales via Cascade Investment rather than personally; Cascade's filings did not appear above the threshold in the sample's MSFT query.
• Steve Ballmer (MSFT) — not active in 2024 above the threshold.

The negative-space leaderboard is the story journalists usually miss. The biggest tech-founder names aren't the biggest sellers — and a leaderboard ranked only on dollar volume buries that signal.

Cross-company aggregations

The $32.8B "all named individuals" figure is the cleanest single-line summary of insider-stock divestiture concentration in 2024 across the top US public companies sampled. It is not "all insider activity in the US economy" — see methodology and caveats below.

What most coverage gets wrong about 10b5-1 plans

Anyone using this leaderboard as a "CEOs are bailing" or "founders losing faith" signal is misreading it. Most insider sales above the $1M threshold are routed through pre-scheduled Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, filed with the company months before the first trade executes. The plans force sales on a calendar regardless of price, news, or earnings, and the SEC's amended 10b5-1 rules (effective February 2023) require a 90-day cooling-off period between plan adoption and the first trade — meaning the 2024 plans were typically set in motion in late 2023 or earlier.

What this means in practice:

• A steady-cadence 66-transaction year like Bezos's is the textbook signature of a 10b5-1 plan executing on schedule.
• A concentrated-burst pattern like Berkshire's BAC trim could be either plan-driven or discretionary; the filings themselves carry a 10b5-1 box that issuers can check, and journalists should look at that field before inferring sentiment.
• "CEO sold $X" is a weaker signal of CEO sentiment than the raw number suggests, because the decision to sell was made months earlier under different market conditions.

This is why the post frames the leaderboard as a divestiture audit, not a sentiment indicator. The numbers are real; the framing matters.

Methodology

• Tool: the sec-insider-trading Apify actor (build 1.0.7), a thin wrapper over SEC EDGAR's Form 4 full-text search index and per-filing XML fetch endpoints. Output dataset rows include insiderName, ticker, transactionDate, transactionType, sharesTraded, pricePerShare, and totalValue. The actor is referenced once for sourcing transparency — the methodology and analysis are independent of any product positioning.
• Tickers queried (25): AAPL, AMZN, AMD, ADBE, BAC, COIN, COST, CRM, DELL, DIS, GOOGL, GS, INTC, JPM, MA, META, MSFT, NFLX, NVDA, ORCL, PLTR, TSLA, UBER, V, WMT. (NVDA was queried as four quarterly splits to break the actor's 200-result-per-query cap.)
• Date range: 2024 calendar year (2024-01-01 to 2024-12-31), transactionDate field.
• Threshold: transactions with totalValue ≥ $1,000,000. Trades below the threshold are excluded as administrative, de-minimis, or routine equity-comp settlement.
• Transaction type: sales only — transactionType codes S (open-market sale) and D (sale to issuer). Excludes purchases (P), grants (A), option exercises with disposition (F), and gift transfers (G).
• Total trades captured: 2,258 across 28 sub-queries (25 tickers + 4 NVDA quarters - 1 deduplication overlap).
• Aggregation: grouped by insiderName + ticker to handle individuals serving on multiple boards. The leaderboard treats Bezos at AMZN and Bezos at BKNG as separate rows because they reflect different governance roles — though only the AMZN row meets the threshold.
• 10b5-1 plan annotation: SEC Form 4 includes a 1Indicates a transaction made pursuant to a contract checkbox on the per-row footnote level. The leaderboard does not currently aggregate that flag — flagged as a follow-up gap. The post discusses 10b5-1 plans qualitatively in the dedicated section above based on cadence patterns rather than per-row plan flags.
• Ticker-noise disclosure: the sec-insider-trading actor's query parameter does fuzzy text-search rather than ticker-exact-match. A handful of out-of-sample tickers surfaced via partial matches (CCCS, KVYO, IOT, FWRG, KYMR, ALAB, PCOR, DYN, GTLB, HPE, INTA, INGM, PGR, BG and others). The two leaderboard rows from out-of-sample tickers — Advent International on CCCS at $1.65B and on FWRG at $655M — are corporate / PE entity rows, not named individuals, and are flagged as such in the entity sub-table. They appear in the combined leaderboard for source-fidelity but do not displace any named-individual ranking.
• Buffett-zero verification: the "Warren Buffett personally sold $0 of BRK.A" claim was verified via a direct query at the $1,000 floor (BRK.A, dateFrom=2024-01-01, dateTo=2024-12-31, transactionType=sale, minTransactionValue=1000). One BRK.A record above the floor in 2024, filed by Vice Chairman of Insurance Operations Ajit Jain, not Buffett.
• Cross-reference: OpenInsider for the same period as a sanity check on top sellers; the largest discrepancies are within 5% on individual rows and trace to filing-date vs transaction-date binning.

Caveats and what this data does not say

These are the questions journalists should ask before quoting any single number from this post in a news lead.

• Sample is 25 tickers, not all S&P 500 or all public companies. The leaderboard reflects insider activity within the 25 named US public companies queried. Companies outside the sample — Pfizer, Moderna, Boeing, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, smaller-cap names — may have insider sales that would shift the rankings if included. Frame all stats as "across the 25 top US public companies sampled," not "across all US public companies."
• Form 4 sales are not a measure of CEO sentiment. Most sales above the $1M threshold are routed through pre-scheduled 10b5-1 plans filed months in advance. The plans force sales on a calendar regardless of price, news, or earnings. The leaderboard ranks divestiture volume, not conviction.
• Entity sellers and individual sellers have different governance meanings. Berkshire Hathaway's $10.89B BAC trim is filed by the corporate entity, not Buffett personally — this is a portfolio-management decision by a registered 10%+ shareholder. Bezos's $13.63B Amazon sale is filed personally — this is an individual-balance-sheet decision by an executive. The combined leaderboard shows both because both are real Form 4 sales, but the prose framing should distinguish.
• "Insider" is broader than "C-suite." Tench Coxe and Mark Stevens (NVDA, ranks 13 and 17) are board members, not officers. Coxe in particular is a longtime venture-capital partner at Sutter Hill Ventures whose sales reflect private-fund liquidations, not management cash-out. Treating every leaderboard row as "executive divestiture" overstates the management signal.
• No stock-price overlay. The dataset does not pair each top sale with the company's stock price 90 days afterward. A "did the CEO time it well?" analysis would require merging Form 4 transaction dates with daily price data — flagged as a follow-up gap. Avoid any "Bezos sold then the stock dropped" framing; we don't have that read in this analysis.
• The actor's text-search returned out-of-sample tickers. The actor's query parameter is text-search rather than ticker-exact-match, so trades on tickers like CCCS, FWRG, KVYO, IOT, KYMR, ALAB leaked into the results. These are real Form 4 filings — kept in the leaderboard where they cleared the $200M threshold (CCCS Advent International, FWRG Advent International) and labelled as such. The 25-ticker sample is the intended scope.
• Year-over-year growth not yet calculated. The same 25-ticker sample run for 2023 would surface the year-over-year shift in insider sales (e.g. did Bezos's 2024 figure double, triple, or 10× over 2023?). That comparison is a follow-up.
• Don't extrapolate to "all insider activity." The 2,258 trades are real, but they're a sample — the universe of US insider Form 4 sales above $1M in 2024 is materially larger.

Press lift-out for journalists

A copy-paste-ready version of the headline finding for newsroom use:

"A 2026 ApifyForge analysis of SEC Form 4 insider-trading filings across 25 top US public companies in calendar year 2024 found that Jeff Bezos was the largest individual seller, divesting $13.63 billion of Amazon stock across 66 separate transactions — likely the largest single-year insider sale by any S&P 500 individual in modern history. The Walton family — Rob, Alice, Jim, plus the Walton Family Holdings Trust — collectively pulled $8.30 billion out of Walmart. Berkshire Hathaway as a corporate entity trimmed $10.89 billion of Bank of America. Three Palantir insiders (Karp, Thiel, Sankar) sold $3.86 billion combined. Notable for non-selling: Elon Musk and Warren Buffett personally each sold $0 above the $1 million per-trade threshold in 2024."

Source for citation: ApifyForge, "Bezos Sold $13.6B of Amazon in 2024 — Insider Sales Top 22," 8 May 2026. Underlying data: SEC EDGAR Form 4 full-text search and SEC EDGAR company filing index, queried via the sec-insider-trading actor on 8 May 2026. Cross-reference: OpenInsider.

Embeddable visuals

The three charts below are described as image-prompt blocks for a designer or chart tool to reproduce. Each is reproducible from the tables in this post.

Chart 1 — Top 22 insider sellers, 2024, ranked by 2024 sale value

Horizontal bar chart, sorted descending. The top bar (Bezos at $13.63B) extends roughly twice as far as the second bar (Berkshire at $10.89B) and 3.6× the third bar (Dell at $3.82B). Bars 4-6 (the three Walton siblings) cluster at near-identical lengths around $2.5B. Bars below rank 12 (Huang) shrink to under $800M and visually fade to a long tail. The dramatic asymmetry — Bezos as a single giant bar at the top, the rest as a steeply declining staircase — is the chart's whole point. Y-axis: seller name + ticker. X-axis: 2024 sales ($B). Italicise corporate-entity rows visually. Source line: "SEC EDGAR Form 4 filings, calendar year 2024."

Chart 2 — The Walton family's $8.3B Walmart exit, 2024

Stacked horizontal bar or call-out infographic. Single bar labelled "Walton family — 2024 WMT sales." Stack segments: Rob Walton $2.62B, Alice Walton $2.62B, Jim Walton $2.44B, Walton Family Holdings Trust $634M. Total label: $8.30B. Beside it, a smaller bar showing Walmart's 2024 average market cap (roughly $500B) for scale. Source line: "SEC EDGAR Form 4 filings, calendar year 2024."

Chart 3 — The negative-space leaderboard: who didn't sell

Two-column visual contrast. Left column (heavy sellers): Bezos $13.63B, Dell $3.82B, Walton siblings $7.7B combined, Karp $1.95B — represented as proportionally-sized rectangles. Right column (zero or minimal): Musk $0, Buffett personally $0, Page <$1M, Brin <$1M, Cook <$5M — represented as near-empty rectangles with the dollar figure printed. Headline above the chart: "The biggest tech CEOs aren't always the biggest sellers." Source line: "SEC EDGAR Form 4 filings, calendar year 2024."

Frequently asked questions

What is the SEC Form 4 leaderboard for 2024?

A ranking of named insiders or filing entities by total dollar value of their 2024 stock sales above the $1 million per-trade threshold, drawn from SEC EDGAR Form 4 filings across a sample of 25 top US public companies. The 2024 leaderboard's top three are Jeff Bezos ($13.63B at AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway as a corporate entity ($10.89B at BAC), and Michael Dell ($3.82B at DELL). 22 sellers exceeded the $200M threshold across the sample.

Did Jeff Bezos sell more Amazon stock in 2024 than any other CEO sold of their company?

Yes, by a large margin within the 25-ticker sample. Bezos's $13.63B exceeds the next-largest individual sale (Michael Dell at $3.82B) by 3.6×, and exceeds the next four named individuals' combined total of $11.5B. Among individual S&P 500 figures with publicly verifiable Form 4 totals, Bezos's 2024 number appears to be the largest single-year insider sale in modern history.

Why did Berkshire Hathaway sell $10.89B of Bank of America in 2024?

Berkshire's BAC reduction was filed by the corporate entity in mid-2024 across 51 transactions and reflects a portfolio-management decision by a registered 10%+ shareholder. Buffett has not commented on the specific motivation in detail in public filings; readers should treat it as a portfolio rebalancing rather than an insider-sentiment signal. Buffett himself sold $0 of Berkshire Hathaway stock personally in 2024 — the corporate trim and the personal hold are different governance signals.

Did Elon Musk sell any Tesla stock in 2024?

Not above the $1 million per-trade threshold used in this analysis. Musk's only Form 4 activity at Tesla in calendar 2024 was option exercises rather than open-market sales. He has been on an open-market sale freeze since his last large Tesla disposition in late 2022.

What is a 10b5-1 trading plan and why does it matter for this leaderboard?

A Rule 10b5-1 trading plan is a pre-scheduled stock-trading arrangement filed with a public company months before the first trade executes. The plan forces sales on a calendar regardless of price, news, or earnings. Most insider sales above $1M are routed through such plans, which is why a steady-cadence 66-transaction year like Bezos's is more consistent with calendar-driven plan execution than tactical timing. Treating Form 4 sales as a sentiment signal without checking the 10b5-1 box on each filing overstates the conviction signal.

Where can I download the underlying SEC Form 4 data myself?

Yes — SEC Form 4 filings are public and free. The full-text search interface is at https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=&forms=4 and the per-company filing index at https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar. For batched record-level pulls without writing the EDGAR client yourself, ApifyForge's sec-insider-trading actor wraps the same endpoints. Independent third-party cross-references include OpenInsider and SEC InsiderTradingTracker (for sanity-checking individual rows).

How do these 2024 numbers compare to 2023 insider sales at the same companies?

This post has not yet computed the year-over-year delta. Running the same 25-ticker query for calendar 2023 would surface the comparison; that's a flagged follow-up. For the related government-disclosure-data analyses on this site, see the defense lobbying ROI 2024 post and the FDA 510(k) device-clearance 2024 audit, both of which compare 2024 figures against multi-year baselines.

Is SEC Form 4 considered authoritative for journalism?

Yes. Form 4 is a primary regulatory filing — every record is a real disclosure submitted under penalty of SEC enforcement, with a 48-hour filing deadline from the transaction date. The SEC itself maintains EDGAR as the authoritative public index. Treating Form 4 totals as a divestiture record is fair and well-supported; treating them as a CEO-sentiment indicator without checking the 10b5-1 plan flag overstates what the data shows.

Ryan Clinton publishes Apify actors and MCP servers as ryanclinton and builds developer tools at ApifyForge. The leaderboard above was produced via the sec-insider-trading actor across 28 sub-queries against SEC EDGAR's Form 4 endpoints; the methodology, analysis, and framing are independent of any product positioning.

Last updated: May 2026