Key points
- Nine Form 144 notices from CrowdStrike insiders since June 5 cover $195.7 million of stock.
- Chief executive George Kurtz accounts for $145.3 million of that across two of the nine.
- Kurtz's Forms 4 check the Rule 10b5-1 box. Finance chief Burt Podbere's do not.
- The July 2 four-for-one split makes the share counts on these notices incomparable, including inside a single filing.
A Form 144 reached the SEC on Monday from CrowdStrike (CRWD) chief financial officer Burt Podbere. It covers 7,622 Class A shares worth $1,481,259, to be sold on or after August 3 through Fidelity. The shares vested out of restricted stock units on July 31, three days before the planned sale.
Taken alone it's a small filing of the most ordinary kind. Equity vests, equity gets sold. What made me pull the rest of the file is that it's the ninth Form 144 from a CrowdStrike insider since June 5. Together those nine cover $195.7 million.
| Filed | Insider | Relationship on notice | Shares | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 5 | Gerhard Watzinger | Director | 20,000 | $14,381,800 |
| June 5 | Denis O'Leary | Director | 19,250 | $13,842,483 |
| June 22 | George Kurtz | President, CEO, Director | 18,705 | $12,810,306 |
| June 22 | Michael Sentonas | Officer | 12,216 | $8,366,250 |
| June 22 | Burt Podbere | Officer | 8,398 | $5,811,711 |
| July 1 | Potomac Investments LP | Director | 5,000 | $3,863,700 |
| July 13 | Denis O'Leary | Director | 14,500 | $2,714,110 |
| July 17 | George Kurtz | President, CEO, Director | 650,000 | $132,444,000 |
| August 3 | Burt Podbere | Officer | 7,622 | $1,481,259 |
Every one of those nine filings announces an intention to sell. It says an insider has told a broker to go ahead, and the actual sale can come in smaller or get dropped entirely. The dollar figures above are the filers' own, each calculated off a recent close.
The share column holds two different units
The number that stands out in that table is 650,000, and most of it is an illusion. CrowdStrike split its stock four for one, with split-adjusted trading starting July 2. Every notice filed on or before July 1 counts pre-split shares, and every notice from July 13 on counts post-split shares.
Put Kurtz's two notices in the same units and the picture changes. His June filing was 18,705 pre-split shares, or 74,820 in today's shares. His July filing was 650,000. That's a step up of about nine times, which is plenty large, and well short of the thirty-five-fold reading the raw column gives you.
Podbere's Monday notice manages to do it inside a single document. Rule 144 makes the filer list their own sales from the prior three months. His list reads 1,933 shares on May 4 and 8,398 shares on June 22. Both are pre-split counts, printed directly above the 7,622 post-split shares he's now selling. Convert them and his May sale becomes 7,732 shares, his June sale 33,592. That makes Monday's filing the smallest of the three, though the raw column ranks it second. Anyone screening these filings on share count will get CrowdStrike wrong until the pre-split entries age out of the three-month lookback.
Kurtz sells on a plan. Podbere picks his days.
Only one of the nine notices names a Rule 10b5-1 plan. That's the July 1 filing from Potomac Investments LP, which dates its plan to June 27, 2025. The other eight leave the field blank, including both of Kurtz's and both of Podbere's. It's tempting to read something into that, but the Form 144 is the wrong document to read it from. The Form 4 that follows the sale carries an actual checkbox.
Those checkboxes disagree with each other, and the split is a clean one. Every Form 4 George Kurtz has filed since July 17 marks the 10b5-1 box. Both of the Forms 4 Podbere filed for his May and June sales leave it blank. So the chief executive is selling on an instruction he signed in advance, on dates a broker holds him to. The finance chief chose his own.
That's the distinction our insider tracker flags as an insider's own call, and it's worth keeping straight. A discretionary sale is legal and cleared by counsel. Often it's an executive paying a tax bill on stock that vested last week, which is what Podbere's notice describes. Read it as a different fact from a plan signed months ago, and one that deserves more attention than the dollar amount beside it. We went through how these plans work, and where they can still be gamed, in a separate piece.
Kurtz's July notice is also running well behind its own headline. His Forms 4 covering July 15 through July 29 report 107,466 shares actually sold for about $20.7 million. That's a pace near 10,000 shares a session across eleven trading days, and 16.5 percent of the 650,000 shares the notice permits. A notice sets a ceiling, and this one has plenty of ceiling left.
All of this selling has run into a rising stock. CrowdStrike closed at $102.79 on April 15 and at $190.86 on July 31, and traded at $202.21 at 3:05 p.m. Eastern on Monday, the day it published its 2026 threat hunting report. The stock has close to doubled since April and sits just under its July 14 closing high of $210.73. Watzinger and O'Leary filed their June notices at a split-adjusted $179.77 and have watched it climb since.
Kurtz's July notice still has about 542,500 shares in it, so the thing to watch is whether his Forms 4 keep arriving at 10,000 shares a session. Podbere has now filed three notices in three months, which makes September worth a look. For what CrowdStrike is being valued at while all this happens, we went through cybersecurity multiples here. For a cleaner example of a plan-driven chief executive selling, there's the Micron pattern.
Sources
- SEC Form 144 for Burt Podbere, CrowdStrike Holdings, filed August 3, 2026 (accession 0001959173-26-005538), including its record of sales in the prior three months
- SEC Form 144 for George Kurtz, filed July 17, 2026 (accession 0001968582-26-000734), and his Forms 4 filed July 17 through July 30, 2026
- SEC Forms 4 for Burt Podbere filed May 5 and June 23, 2026 (accessions 0001778610-26-000013 and 0001778610-26-000018)
- CrowdStrike daily closes, April 15 through July 31, 2026, and intraday pricing on August 3
