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Pre-IPO cash-out: All three founders pocketed over $150 million apiece by cashing out shares ahead of the IPO. Collectively, the founders and early investor Jack Cogen sold $660 million of CoreWeave stock before the March 2025 IPO, and another $640 million since.
The company’s execs have sold over $2.3 billion of stock since the IPO lockup expired in August 2025. Its institutional backers, such as Magnetar Financial, have sold over $5.5 billion in stock, cutting its stake in half.
Magnetar Capital, CoreWeave, Inc. CRWV-3.62% largest institutional backer, faced major controversy for its role in the 2008 financial crisis through a strategy dubbed the “Magnetar Trade.” The hedge fund allegedly helped create and finance risky Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) while simultaneously betting that these same investments would collapse.
The Magnetar Trade generated significant backlash and media scrutiny, most notably through an investigative series by ProPublica. Critics accused Magnetar of intentionally encouraging investment banks to bundle the riskiest, lowest-quality subprime mortgages into CDOs.
Because Magnetar had protected itself against losses by purchasing credit default swaps, it stood to make massive profits when the housing market inevitably crashed and the CDOs became worthless:
“ In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were falling. Investors began to balk at buying complex mortgage securities. The housing bubble, which had propelled a historic growth in home prices, seemed poised to deflate. And if it had, the great financial crisis of 2008, which produced the Great Recession of 2008-09, might have come sooner and been less severe.
At just that moment, a few savvy financial engineers at a suburban Chicago hedge fund helped revive the Wall Street money machine, spawning billions of dollars of securities ultimately backed by home mortgages.
When the crash came, nearly all of these securities became worthless, a loss of an estimated $40 billion paid by investors, the investment banks who helped bring them into the world, and, eventually, American taxpayers.
Yet the hedge fund, named Magnetar for the super-magnetic field created by the last moments of a dying star, earned outsized returns in the year the financial crisis began.
How Magnetar pulled this off is one of the untold stories of the meltdown. Only a small group of Wall Street insiders was privy to what became known as the Magnetar Trade.”