Twitter Co-Founder Decides To Sell Almost A Third Of His Shares

This could be another major setback for Twitter when one of the company’s higher ups decides to sell this many shares.

According to Business Insider, Evan Williams, the co-founder and board member of Twitter, has decided to sell almost a third of his shares.

He made a blog post to detail his reasoning for selling and it reads:

“After a year and a half of no selling, I have filed a new 10b5–1 plan to liquidate a minority of my TWTR over the next year,” Williams wrote.

“This plan kicked in on Monday. It actually pains me to be selling at this point, but this sale is all about personal context, not company context.”

SEC filings revealed that Williams has already sold around $4 million worth of his Twitter shares on Wednesday. In the next few months he will sell up to 30% more of his shares.

When all is sold and done, Williams will have a little under 4% of a stake in Twitter left. Though he said in his blog post that it is in personal context, and not company context, investors may not feel that reassured.

According to a representative who told Business Insider, Williams will still remain on Twitter’s board.

“Evan Williams recently entered into a pre-arranged 10b5-1 stock trading plan as part of his continued efforts to diversify his financial positions and focus on his charitable organization and other endeavors,” the representative said.

“Ev, a co-founder of Twitter and member of the Board since 2007, has been a champion of Twitter since Day 1 and intends to maintain a significant ownership position in the company. The plan is not expected to result in the sale of more than 30% of Ev’s holdings.”

“I’m not a public market investor,” Williams also wrote in his blog post. “And I feel very fortunate to be able to use funds to enable other people to do good things.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) and have not been compensated for this article.