Key points
- Macdonald bought 70,000 shares for $5.3 million on September 4
- Largest Uber insider purchase in our records
- Bought a day after Uber announced 3,300 job cuts
- Stock traded below his $75.83 average on Tuesday
Uber (UBER) president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald bought $5.3 million of the company's stock last Friday. He paid an average of $75.83 a share for 70,000 shares. It's the largest open-market purchase by an Uber insider in the Form 4 filings we have on record, which go back to August 2025, and the stock was trading below his price on Tuesday, at about $73.60.
The purchase showed up on our insider tracker on Tuesday, from a Form 4 filed with the SEC the same day, September 8. A Form 4 is the report an executive has to file within two business days of buying or selling their own company's shares. The filing shows two blocks of purchases on September 4, one of 54,325 shares at prices from $75.23 to $76.22 and one of 15,675 shares at prices from $76.23 to $76.85. The purchase was not identified as being made under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, the kind of arrangement executives set up in advance to buy or sell on a schedule.
What makes it interesting is the timing. Uber said on September 3 that it would cut about 3,300 jobs, close to a tenth of its staff, and reduce management roles by a fifth, 24/7 Wall St reported. Macdonald, who runs day-to-day operations, bought the next day.
Why is Uber's stock down this year?
Uber ended 2025 at $81.71 and traded as high as $101.99 in the past year, according to StockAnalysis. The purchase follows several difficult headlines. In July, the Financial Times reported that Alphabet's Waymo was considering running its own robotaxi service in Austin and Atlanta from January 2028, when its agreement with Uber allows, and Uber fell almost 5 percent that day, Yahoo Finance reported. On August 5, second-quarter results showed gross bookings up 24 percent to $58 billion, but the company's forecast for the third quarter came in just under what analysts expected, and the stock fell 5.3 percent, according to CNBC. Then came the job cuts.
The bigger question hanging over all of it is whether Uber stays the main place people book a ride once Waymo and Tesla run their own robotaxi fleets. That's not something a Form 4 can answer. What the Form 4 does tell us is that the executive in charge of operations put $5.3 million of his own money in at a price the market has since moved below.
How does this compare with what other Uber insiders have done?
The contrast with a year ago is sharp. On September 22, 2025, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi sold 150,000 shares for about $15.1 million at an average of $100.48, and chief legal officer Tony West sold 100,000 shares for about $10 million the same day, both under prearranged plans, according to their Form 4 filings. West kept selling small blocks each month into January at prices from $80 to $93. Chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy is the only other buyer in those filings. He bought 22,453 shares for $1.6 million on February 24 at an average of $71.25, a few dollars below where Macdonald bought.
So the pattern is executives selling near $100 last fall and buying in the $70s this year. The transactions involved different executives, and the planned sales don't establish what those sellers thought the stock was worth on execution day. That pattern doesn't tell you where the stock goes next. Insiders are often early, and sometimes they're just wrong. It does tell you the price at which two of the company's top officers bought shares with their own money.
Macdonald's full filing history is on Uber's filings page.
