Yes, if I wanted 60K shares of Apple it would cost quite a bit more than $8 per share.
What am I missing? Apple hasn't been under $8 for at least 2 decades.
It’s called stock options. At some point he must have been granted/given/paid in stock options - that is, the option to purchase stocks at a particular price.
So he sat on it until now - apparently Gore is trying to raise money and/or knows something that the general public/markets don’t know (insider trading?).
"Al Gore . . . exercised an option to purchase nearly 60,000 shares of the tech giant at the bargain basement price of $7.48, costing him a total of about $445,000."
He probably bought leaps a few years ago.
Anybody can do it, you just have to guess right.
A leap is a long term option.
An option is where you purchase the right to buy a stock for a certain price for a certain amount of time, usually in 6 month increments.
You are buying time and value.
Apple was in the single digits around 2006. He probably was given options when he joined the board.
It was apparently in AG’s contract. But I cannot imagine how this hypocrite added 29 million in value. I am not so sure Apple is now a well run company, especially after reading this.
If you had accumulated options to purchase Apple stock at a particular price, you could hold on to those options for years ( or even decades). If he had exercised those options in September when the stock peaked, he would have made an additional $6,000,000 and would have been able to keep more of it because of the Bush tax rates on capital gains (15% vs. the 20.0% Obama rate).
Options. He was given/awarded/paid 60K shares for his directorship at a price of $8 that probably fully vested recently or were about to expire.
It’s a pay off. Ought to be illegal.
Likely, he was on their board at some point back right after he was VP and on the take. They gave him options to buy stock at that price as payola..
Stock options are a common way of a company attracting/paying an executive.
The company pays the executive a salary, maybe below prevailing rates, and sweetens to deal with stock options.
Kinda like ‘profit sharing’ but possibly on a much grander scale.
They don’t always pay off, rarely to this magnitude.
Options.
He was on the Apple board for a while and part of his compensation was stock options, which obviously never expired. It is not uncommon. Long ago, I was a regional director for a Fortune 200 company. At the time, due to cash flow issues, all of our bonuses were paid in stock options. I exercised them 12 years after the fact, and made out like a bandit.