Executives at CoreWeave, one of the biggest success stories of the artificial intelligence boom, are publicly touting the company’s leading position in the AI race and the future windfalls it promises.
They were converting their stock into cash behind the scenes.
Three of Coreweave’s top executives collectively sold more than $1 billion worth of company stock in the first four months of 2026, according to public filings.
Executives at only four other S&P 500 companies made similar levels of stock sales during the same period, according to Insider Finance, which tracks such sales by executives.
“It’s in the 99th percentile,” said Rob Hibbard, co-founder of Insider Finance. “It’s certainly an eye-opener.”
CoreWeave is one of several once-obscure companies in AI infrastructure that are funneling fanciful wealth to low-profile executives. The lavish paydays, mostly stock awards, come at a time when their companies are still in the midst of huge, complex projects that are unprofitable and have short track records. Some executives are selling stock quickly, a move that could appear to be at odds with the long-term benefits they expect going forward.
Coreweave CEO Michael Intrater steadily sold $138 million in stock through 2026, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Brian Venturo, CoreWeave’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, sold $658 million in stock through 2026, according to CoreWeave’s filing. Another co-founder, Brannin McBee, who serves as the company’s chief development officer, sold about $240 million in stock.
On Coreweave’s recent conference call with analysts, Paul Meeks, head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets, said senior executives asked why the company was actively selling shares. Meeks said McVeigh paused for a moment and said, “I’m not going to talk about that today.”
A CoreWeave spokesperson declined to comment on the exchange.
Coreweave’s stock price has fluctuated wildly since its IPO last March at $40 a share, peaking at $184 last summer. It was trading at $125.50 at market close on Monday.
Management is free to sell shares during periodic, pre-arranged sales periods aimed at preventing insider trading. But governance experts said the large sale could send an ominous signal to the market.
“If you believe in the viability of your product, you won’t end up selling your stock because you’ll get more value down the road,” said Charles Elson, founding director of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance.
Elson said large stock sales by company insiders can be seen as a “warning sign to investors” that “they may know something you don’t.”
A CoreWeave spokesperson said Intrator, Venturo and McBee are “deeply committed to the long-term growth and execution of CoreWeave” and arranged the stock sale “to manage personal liquidity and diversification.”
On April 30, CoreWeave announced its first disclosure of executive compensation since going public a little more than a year ago. Intrater, 57, earned about $33 million in compensation in 2025, the filing said. Mr. Venturo and Mr. McVey, both 41, earned $18.8 million and $12.7 million, respectively. The majority of the payments to the three individuals will be stock awards that will vest over the next several years.
Big payday and big questions
Iren, an Australian-based Bitcoin mining company founded in 2018, has refocused its efforts to build out data centers in the United States, paying brother co-CEOs Daniel Roberts and William Roberts $72.6 million each (for the majority of the stock) in 2025, but that year the company announced it would halt expansion of its mining operations to focus on AI infrastructure. The men were paid more than 10 times what they earned in 2024, and their combined compensation represented nearly 30% of the company’s revenue in 2025.
“When a company is still very young and may not have been tested yet in terms of product revenue, the compensation levels are off the charts and hard to understand,” said Robert McCormick, executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, an organization that provides guidance on corporate governance.
In a public filing in September 2025, the brothers disclosed that together they sold $49 million in stock and planned to sell another $66.2 million.
“Iren’s executive compensation program has been approved by shareholders,” an Iren spokesperson told Business Insider. “Our philosophy is to attract, retain and motivate high-performing leaders while driving long-term shareholder value creation.”
John Todaro, senior equity analyst at Needham & Company, said he is not concerned about Ilen and Coreweave’s large stock compensation and stock sales practices, as long as management retains enough stock to remain aligned with shareholder interests.
“I don’t think what we’re flagging is what’s really at the limit for us,” Todaro said, pointing to impressive performance by both Iren and CoreWeave.
In November 2025, Iren announced it had signed its first large-scale AI cloud computing agreement with Microsoft, with Microsoft agreeing to pay Iren $9.7 billion in lease payments for a data center project it is developing in Texas.
CoreWeave’s revenue in 2025 increased 168% year-over-year to $5.1 billion, and future contract revenue (revenue earned when providing data center equipment to customers) jumped $50 billion over the year.
The company announced large-scale AI computing deals with Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
“From where we sit, what some of these guys have accomplished in a short period of time is very impressive,” Todaro said of both companies.
Soaring stock compensation
Although some AI infrastructure executives have not sold their stock, they are receiving compensation that would be considered outrageous even in a corporate environment that rewards top leaders with large sums of money.
CleanSpark, another cryptocurrency mining company that announced in October that it would turn to data center development, paid CEO S. Matthew Schultz about $45 million last year, including $37 million in stock and a $5.5 million bonus. Schultz, who served as the company’s CEO from 2014 to 2019, was re-appointed to the role in early September, just before the end of the company’s fiscal year on September 30th. This means that after taking over the reins of the company for less than a month, he received an extraordinary salary.
Mr. Schultz, who is also chairman of the CleanSpark board, received total compensation of approximately $14 million as of 2024.
Outgoing CEO Zachary Bradford will be paid about $49 million in 2025.
Harry Sudock, CleanSpark’s chief business officer, told Business Insider that executive compensation is plentiful in competitive sectors such as crypto mining and high-performance computing, and companies including CleanSpark have had to pay to compete for top leaders.
“It’s more a reflection of the market and the value that key talent can bring,” Sadock said. “I think it’s less about, ‘Does this company or that company have a rich culture?’ and more about, is this market active and competitive?”
Asher Genuto, 31, CEO of Hut8, another crypto mining company with an eye on AI infrastructure, earned nearly $240 million in total compensation in 2025, the majority of which was stock compensation.
Genuto’s salary package last year was 23 times what he would earn in 2024.