Key points
- AST SpaceMobile director Adriana Cisneros spent $619,200 on ASTS shares on August 31.
- It was her fourth open-market purchase and exceeded the value of her previous three buys combined.
- The purchase was discretionary rather than executed under a scheduled trading plan.
- ASTS has lost about half its value since reaching its June high.
Tuesday's update to our insider tracker included a notable purchase by an AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) director. Adriana Cisneros, who has served on the board since AST became a public company in 2021, bought 10,822 shares on August 31. Her weighted-average price was $57.22, putting the total investment at $619,200. The Form 4 arrived on EDGAR Tuesday afternoon without the Rule 10b5-1 box checked, so the trade was not carried out automatically under a scheduled plan. Cisneros chose to make the purchase that day, so the tracker labels it an "own call."
The filing is actually three purchases in one. The biggest slice, 8,768 shares at $57.00, went through 1979 Edendale Investments Ltd., an entity held by a trust she's the beneficiary of. Her spouse, Nicholas Griffin, bought 1,384 shares at $57.79 in his own name. Another 670 shares at $58.87 went into an account belonging to their adult child, a college student who still lives at home according to the footnote. All of it is reported as indirect ownership. It takes her total to 797,023 shares, worth about $47 million at Monday's close of $59.10.
This is her fourth open-market buy of AST stock, and each one has come at a higher price than the last. In December 2022 she spent about $200,000 at $5.50 a share, which Simply Wall St flagged at the time as the largest insider purchase at the company in a year. In September 2024 she added $129,884 worth at prices between $26.17 and $26.44, per Investing.com. Last November she picked up 750 shares at $50.79, or $38,092. Those three together come to $368,000. Monday's purchase alone was $619,200. She's paying the most she ever has and buying the most she ever has, at the same time.
Cisneros isn't a typical outside director. She runs Cisneros, the Latin American media and real estate group her grandfather founded, and she was AST's first institutional backer. Bloomberg reported in 2023 that she led the company's Series A with an initial $10 million and then helped recruit Vodafone, Rakuten, and American Tower as investors. Her line in that piece has stuck with me: "If AST works, it's going to be bigger than anything I've, that we've ever touched at Cisneros." She also chairs the board's audit committee, so she sees the numbers before the rest of us do.
