After Palantir (PLTR.US) surged, co-founder Peter Thiel plans to sell nearly $1 billion in stocks to cash out.

After Palantir (PLTR.US) announced last Friday that it would officially join the S&P 500 index on September 23, its stock price soared. One of the company's largest shareholders may cash out by selling up to nearly $1 billion worth of stock. According to regulatory filings submitted by Palantir in August, Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir, through his investment company Rivendell 7 LLC, adopted a "10b5-1 rule plan" on May 15. This plan allows Rivendell 7 to sell up to 28,590,737 shares of stock by December 31, 2025 or earlier. Executives and directors of companies adopt these plans in order to avoid profiting from trading stocks based on undisclosed information. These plans automatically execute trades when preset conditions (such as price, volume, and time) are met. As of now, Thiel's stock sale plan has not executed any sales of Palantir stock. The last time Thiel sold Palantir stock was between May 8 and 10, when he sold a total of 13 million shares through a trading plan set on December 12, totaling $273.5 million at an average sale price of $21.11 per share. In these transactions, Rivendell 7 sold 8 million shares of Palantir stock, leaving 62.9 million shares remaining. Thiel's other investment company, STS Holdings II LLC, also sold 5 million shares of Palantir stock, leaving 15.7 million shares. Additionally, other investment companies under Thiel's name hold 21 million shares of Palantir stock. Furthermore, Thiel's investment companies also own 32.5 million shares of Palantir Class B stock with super-voting rights. As a co-founder of Palantir, Thiel also separately holds the voting rights to 335,000 shares of Class F stock through the Founder Voting Trust. Publicly traded Palantir stock has one vote per share, while Class B stock has 10 votes per share. The Founder Voting Trust consists of 1,005,000 shares of Class F stock, with the three co-founders of Palantir - Thiel, CEO Alexander Karp, and President and Secretary Stephen Cohen - each holding an equal share, representing 49.99% voting rights. This year, Palantir's stock price has doubled, with a 14% increase on Monday after the announcement of joining the S&P 500 index last Friday. At the current price of $34.17 per share, the total value of the stock Thiel plans to sell is approximately $977 million. It is not known when Thiel's stock sale plan will be executed, but the current stock price is already 62% higher than the average price when he sold in May. As of Monday's close, the stock rose by 0.46% to $34.76.