Jeff Bezos has sold around $1.7 billion worth of Amazon stock over the course of two days as the share price reached a new all-time. For many veterans in the cryptocurrency industry, it is reminiscent of when Litecoin founder Charlie Lee did the same thing with his LTC stash.
December 2017 was perhaps the craziest time for the cryptocurrency market on record. Not only did Bitcoin (BTC) hit a record high of $20,000 but virtually all altcoins rallied beyond anyone’s imagination.
Then, there was the story of Charlie Lee, who decided to sell all of his Litecoin (LTC) holdings at the very top on Dec 20 of that year. [CNBC] Since then, the Litecoin project has been in a perpetual crisis of trust over its very founder no longer having any skin in the game.
Now, it’s looking like Jeff Bezos himself just pulled a ‘Charlie Lee.’ The Amazon titan has been quietly selling off $1.7 billion worth of his stock in Amazon according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Forbes] He completed the sale over two days, on Jan 31 and on Feb 3. Bezos effectively sold the top, assuming Amazon doesn’t climb higher. January has seen Amazon’s stock jump from $1,828 to $2,008 and is currently trading for $2,049 per share.
The striking resemblance of Jeff Bezos’s sell-off to Charlie Lee didn’t go unnoticed in the cryptocurrency sphere, either. Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) recently took to Twitter to call Bezos the ‘Charlie Lee of tech stocks.’ In fact, the sell-off may be a glaring sign that the top is in.
The top is in!!!
Remember when @SatoshiLite sold all his $LTC, then the market tanked?!
Bezos is the Lee of Tech stocks. #stonks #NYSE #NASDAQhttps://t.co/pagyOZJaVi
— Mati Greenspan [tweets are not trading advice] (@MatiGreenspan) February 5, 2020
Charlie Lee was once the biggest proponent of the ‘HODL’ mentality. However, he went from HODL to SODL in Dec 2017 which won him the ire and ridicule of the cryptocurrency community. Since then, the Litecoin Foundation has struggled to remain solvent as its funds dry up. BeInCrypto reported that monthly ‘donations’ to the foundation were just $1,000 in Q1 of 2019. Generally speaking, a founder selling off their holdings is a bad sign, however, what’s true for Litecoin might not be true for Amazon.
Amazon’s stock probably won’t tank as a result of Bezos’s sell-off. By all accounts, it really does look like Bezos pulled a Charlie Lee on investors — and to those of us in the cryptocurrency world, it looks awfully familiar.
