Spotify Technology SA’s founders recently pocketed about $1 billion from selling the audio-streaming giant’s stock as they increasingly build up investments outside the company.
Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon offloaded more than 2.5 million of the Swedish firm’s shares last year through US banks and continued to cut their stakes in recent weeks. That’s the most stock the pair have sold between them in a calendar year since 2019.
Ek, Spotify’s chief executive officer, filed on Feb. 2 to sell shares worth about $37 million through JPMorgan Chase & Co. as part of a trading plan, while Lorentzon offloaded almost $400 million of stock through Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in November. The two still own a roughly 16% stake between them in the Stockholm-based company, making up the bulk of their combined $22 billion fortune.
Ek, 41, and Spotify director Lorentzon, 55, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Shares of New York-listed Spotify have surged 239% since the start of last year — outpacing the S&P 500 Index almost nine-fold — as the company continues to rebound from a growth slowdown and the lingering effects of the pandemic.
Its shares hit a record high of $637.69 on Monday after the company last week reported better-than-expected subscriber growth in the fourth quarter while eliminating some 1,500 jobs, leading to its first full-year profit. Since the start of 2022, Ek and Lorentzon have added more than $10 billion to their combined net worth, largely through Spotify’s stock boom.
In recent years, Ek has shifted his wealth beyond Spotify into businesses focused on artificial intelligence and climate as part of his plan to put about $1 billion of his net worth in European startups. He and Lorentzon also invested in a Swedish health-care startup last year, while Lorentzon more recently backed a $260 million Series B fundraising round for Neko Health, a Stockholm-based body-scanning company that Ek helped to set up in 2018.
Ek, who founded Spotify in 2006 with Lorentzon, filed to sell about 1.1 million of the company’s stock in 2024 through trading plans, roughly the same as the previous year. Lorentzon, who is also the anchor investor for Nordic private equity firm Cervantes Capital, hadn’t sold stock since 2021 before offloading almost 1.5 million shares of the audio-streaming company last year.
