Key points
- CEO Dara Khosrowshahi bought 141,000 Uber shares
- The filing does not identify a 10b5-1 plan
- His first open-market buy since May 2022
- Second Uber insider buy in a week
Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi bought about $10 million of Uber stock on Thursday. He bought 141,000 shares at an average of $70.96, and he now holds 1,367,100 shares directly. The purchase and the paperwork happened the same day, with the filing accepted at the Securities and Exchange Commission at 12:40 p.m. Eastern.
The disclosure is a Form 4, the filing an executive, director or owner of more than 10% of a company has to make within two business days of trading their own company's stock. This one carries transaction code P, which means an open market purchase rather than shares handed over as compensation. The price is an average, because the shares came in pieces. "The price reported is a weighted average price. These shares were purchased in multiple transactions at prices ranging from $70.73 to $71.18, inclusive," the filing says.
Here is the box I always check first on a purchase like this, and on this filing it is empty. A Form 4 has a checkbox for transactions made under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, which an insider establishes in advance. Khosrowshahi did not check it, meaning the purchase was not reported as a transaction under a Rule 10b5-1 plan.
He is also not the first Uber executive to do this in the past week. Uber president Andrew Macdonald bought 70,000 shares on September 4 at an average of $75.83, about $5.3 million, in a filing that landed on September 8, and both purchases now sit on our insider buying tracker. The chief executive bought twice as many shares six days later and paid about 6% less for them.
It is also the first time Khosrowshahi has bought Uber stock on the open market since May 6, 2022, when he picked up 200,000 shares at an average of $26.7276. That comparison cuts in two directions. The stock has gained about 165% since that purchase, so he waited more than four years and paid a good deal more this week. He reports 53,868 fewer directly held shares today than immediately after that 2022 purchase, reflecting all the transactions in between.
What they are buying into
Uber stock has had a rough stretch. Shares fell 3.5% on September 8 and another 2.8% on September 9, closing at $71.08, after Tesla put its Cybercab into service in Austin. The Cybercab is built only for autonomous ride-hailing, with two seats and no steering wheel, and the worry for Uber shareholders is structural rather than about any single quarter. If a carmaker can run its own robotaxi fleet, the marketplace Uber charges a fee to sit in the middle of matters a little less.
Step back and the drop is bigger than one week. The stock traded as high as $101.99 in September 2025 and is down about 29% from there. It is down about 11% so far in 2026, and it touched $65.56 in late July, its lowest point in a year.
Khosrowshahi bought below Wednesday's close, and the stock has moved up since. Uber closed at $72.56 on Thursday, up 2.1% on the day and about 2% above his average price. That is one day, and one day tells you almost nothing. What the filing does tell you is the size of the commitment: 141,000 shares added to 1,226,100 he already held, so he increased his direct stake by about 11.5% in a single day.
A caution I would apply to any insider purchase, this one included. Executives buy for reasons that are not always a forecast, including optics and the simple fact that a chief executive holding stock is what boards want to see. Purchases are still more interesting than sales, because a sale can mean a tax bill, a house, or a diversification plan, while a purchase has fewer explanations. It is one data point, not a verdict on where the stock goes.
At Thursday's close, Khosrowshahi's 1,367,100 shares are worth about $99.2 million.
