Former Snowflake CEO Slottman Sells Entire Stake After Exercising $40 Million Stock Options

Snowflake Inc. (NASDAQ: SNOW) disclosed that on January 20, board chairman Frank Slootman exercised 200,000 fully vested stock options and sold all 200,000 shares in the open market, generating approximately $41.4 million in proceeds—around KRW 500 billion. After deducting the option exercise price, his net gain was about $39.6 million, or in the low KRW 500 billion range. The sales were executed in tranches at various price levels under a 10b5-1 trading plan established in September 2025. Even after this sale, Slootman still holds equity—through direct ownership and family trusts—valued at several hundred billion KRW. On February 2, Snowflake’s head of product also sold a small portion of his stake, about $2 million (mid-KRW 200 billion), under a separate 10b5-1 plan; this represented a minor fraction of his total holdings.

The company recently signed a multi-year strategic partnership with OpenAI worth $200 million (approximately KRW 270 billion). Under the agreement, OpenAI’s latest generative AI models—including GPT-5.2—will be natively integrated into Snowflake AI Data Cloud, Cortex, and Snowflake Intelligence. Snowflake also announced it will report its fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter and full-year results after U.S. markets close on February 25, focusing investor attention on its AI and data cloud growth rates and guidance.

Snowflake is a U.S. software company that offers a cloud-native data warehouse and AI data cloud, enabling enterprise customers to store, analyze, and run machine learning and generative AI workloads on a single platform. Since its NYSE listing in 2020, the company has sustained high-20% revenue growth. In fiscal Q4 2025, product revenue increased by about 28% year-over-year, underpinning a structure of substantial stock-based compensation and ongoing executive option exercises.