Uber COO Buys $5M; Gates Backs Republic Services

Filings reported on 8 September show Uber President and COO Andrew Gordon MacDonald made two open-market purchases in early September, spending a combined $5.3M on 70,000 shares. The trades were filed at an average price of around $75.60. That is a notable discretionary bet from a serving C-suite officer, and no 10b5-1 pre-arranged plan was flagged. Uber's current short interest sits at just 2.4% of free float, so there is no particular squeeze dynamic at play. The COO's buy looks like straightforward conviction in the company's direction.

Also filed around the same period, Bill Gates continued adding to his position in Republic Services, the waste management group. Three separate purchases totalling roughly $94M were reported across late August and early September, at prices in the $220 to $225 range. Gates is a major shareholder rather than a board executive, but the scale and consistency of the buying is hard to ignore. Republic Services carries a market cap of $74.9B and short interest of just 1.4% of free float.

Elsewhere, Li Ning's largest shareholder Viva China Holdings filed purchases worth over $130M in the Hong Kong-listed sportswear group across late August and early September, signalling continued support at a time when Chinese consumer stocks remain under pressure.

Note: The ORTEX SEC EDGAR Form 4 tables were not accessible in this environment, so US open-market trade codes (P/S) and 10b5-1 flags could not be verified directly from first-party filings. The Uber and Republic Services data above is drawn from the vendor insider table and should be treated with that caveat. The 13D activist filing table was also unavailable, so fresh activist crossings could not be checked today.