36 Insider Sells, Zero Buys: Pinterest's Only Buyer Is Pinterest
CFO Julia Donnelly's last scheduled share sale landed on the SEC ledger on 25 September, five weeks before her exit, capping a year in which every reported insider transaction at Pinterest was a sale while the company itself spent $2 billion on its own stock.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
The sale was scheduled sixteen weeks before anyone knew she was leaving
On 24 September, with five weeks left in the job, Pinterest finance chief Julia Donnelly sold 29,548 shares at a weighted average of $18.61 and filed the Form 4 the next morning 1. The footnote matters more than the trade: the sale ran under a Rule 10b5-1 plan adopted on 7 May, sixteen weeks before the company announced her departure, filling at prices from $18.51 to $18.71. She keeps 751,921 shares, unvested units included 1.
Pinterest said on 28 August that Donnelly, hired from Wayfair in 2023, leaves on 30 October for a private early-stage company; the stock fell as much as 3.8% after hours, and Vikram Naidu, vice president of finance and business operations, becomes interim principal financial officer while an external search runs 23.
The one-way ledger
Her sale is one entry in a year of them. Donnelly has sold 111,465 shares over twelve months and bought none; across Pinterest, insiders filed 36 sales and zero purchases, much of it scheduled dispositions and tax withholding 4. Twelve months of Form 4s record exactly one kind of transaction at this company: a sale.
The only standing buyer is Pinterest itself. The company repurchased $2.02 billion of stock in the first half at an average $18.17, 44 cents below the CFO's sale price, alongside $980 million of new convertible notes and a $1.19 billion drop in cash and marketable securities since December 5. The pace is already fading: $78.6 million of that buyback landed in Q2 itself 5.
Growth walks out the door with her
Donnelly's tenure carries eleven consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth 2. Q2 revenue was $1.18 billion, up 18%, on a record 640 million monthly users, with $311 million of adjusted EBITDA against a $47 million GAAP loss 5. The Q3 guide is $1.19 to $1.21 billion, growth of 13 to 15 percent 5.
Pinterest's growth steps down just as the finance chief walks out
- Revenue growth, % YoY
- Estimate
Data
| Revenue growth, % YoY | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '24 | 17.7% |
| Q4 '24 | 17.6% |
| Q1 '25 | 15.5% |
| Q2 '25 | 16.9% |
| Q3 '25 | 16.8% |
| Q4 '25 | 14.3% |
| Q1 '26 | 17.8% |
| Q2 '26 | 18.2% |
| Q3 '26E (estimate) | 14% (13–15%) |
Naidu inherits that step-down plus the deals of her tenure: a $4 billion AWS cloud commitment a CFO negotiates and a successor pays for 23, and the tvScientific acquisition, which took $447 million of cash and lifted goodwill from $100 million to $475 million 5.
Someone has to be right
The stock is down about a third this year, trading near 8.5 times forward earnings against a $29.05 Street target 7, and one fair-value model puts it at $49.31 4. The board's $18.17 buyback is a bet that twelve months of sellers are wrong. If it fails, the loser is specific: the shareholder who read a $2 billion repurchase as a floor while guidance stepped down to 13 to 15 percent and the CFO who negotiated the $4 billion AWS bill walked out.
Every reference price sits above the $18.17 the board paid
- Share price
- Estimate
Data
| Share price | |
|---|---|
| Board buyback avg | $18.17 |
| CFO plan sale avg | $18.61 |
| Street target (estimate) | $29.05 |
| Fair-value model (estimate) | $49.31 |
Two dates settle it. Every Form 4 filed before the 30 October departure lands on the same one-way ledger, and the Q3 report, unscheduled as of this week 8, will show in its 10-Q whether the only buyer of this stock kept buying at all.
How this brief was made
01Gathered & sourced209 channels · 1,197 articles▾
Agents swept 209 channels and ingested 1,197 articles, then de-duplicated and ranked them for signal.
02Verified & cross-validated8 claims · 26 data feeds▾
Every one of 8 load-bearing claims was checked against primary sources, with 26 live data feeds reconciling the figures and charts.
- 1SEC Form 4, Pinterest Inc., Brau Donnelly Julia, filed 25 September 2026
- 2Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, "Pinterest Finance Chief Julia Donnelly to Step Down in October", 28 August 2026
- 3The NextWeb, "Pinterest CFO Julia Donnelly is leaving to join an early-stage company", 31 August 2026
- 4GuruFocus, "Pinterest (PINS) CFO Donnelly Brau Sells 29,548 Shares as Stock Trades Well Below GF Value", 25 September 2026
- 5Business Wire via Morningstar, "Pinterest Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, Delivers 18% Revenue Growth and Record Users", 4 August 2026
- 6Sharadar quarterly fundamentals, from Pinterest's SEC filings, retrieved 27 September 2026
- 7Yahoo Finance, "Pinterest Has 640 Million Users and Trades at 8x Earnings. So Why Has PINS Stock Lost a Third of Its Value This Year?", 23 September 2026
- 8Pinterest Investor Relations, overview and events calendar, retrieved 27 September 2026
03Reviewed & edited1 human editor▾
One editor read the draft against the evidence, tuned the framing, and signed off before it shipped.
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