George Shaheen, longest tenured NTAP director sold his entire stake on June 10 out of the blue with no 10b5-1 (he doesn't have history of dumping entire stakes and he did it the day before investor day where NTAP introduced 3 year growth and profit goals). Shaheen is out of compliance with NTAP board policy for independent directors requiring 5x annual cash retainer held in equity. Shaheen makes 100k per year and only has 3450 unvested RSUs (but which count towards equity holdings)
Shaheen was interim CEO of Siebel Systems, which was sold to Oracle in 2005.
Shaheen is a prominent Lebanese American. His uncle Alfred Shaheen popularized the Hawaiian dress shirt in the 1960s. Larry Ellison owns 98% of Lanai.
Larry and Safra are Jewish and strong supporters of Israel. Did they force Shaheen to sell his shares before a deal announced so they don't give optics of enriching him with premium offer from Oracle? Maybe bad blood from the Siebel deal in 2005?
NTAP shares haven't closed under its rising 5 day moving average since May 3 when there was significant unusual after hours activity (3 million shares pre and post market on May 3/6).
Larry Ellison has talked about wanting to own NTAP in the past as a lot of NTAP biz is storing Oracle databases. Also, NTAP has 50% of enterprise unstructured data which will be key for unlocking enterprise genAI via RAG.
Thomas Kurian left Oracle in 2018 because he wanted to go multi cloud and had disagreement with Larry. NTAP has relationships with all the hyperscalers and can easily move data between the public clouds (matches Oracle strategy).
George has been at NTAP for 10 years and likely needs to be on his way to managing a much larger organization. The economic gods likely want CPU, networking and data layer to be inside one organization .. integrated offering vs point solutions.
Oracle making play to be major cloud and owning data layer is important.
The layoffs are precursor to a deal as they likely identified redundancies and want to maximize savings plus cross selling synergies.
Interest rates should come down over next 12 months and Trump presidency should allow Oracle/Netapp deal to go through. Safra Catz was on Trump transition team in 2016.