Why billionaire Dustin Moskovitz keeps buying up shares of his software company Asana
Dustin Moskovitz, Asana’s co-founder and CEO.
Asana
The typical playbook for a successful tech founder looks something like this.
Start a company with full ownership. Sell off significant chunks to venture investors as the business progresses. Eventually become a minority owner. Take the company public. Sell more stock over time.
Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz took that playbook and completely rewrote the ending.
Moskovitz, who is still known by many as a co-founder of Facebook, started Asana in 2008 to make work more collaborative through software. By the time he took the company public through a direct listing in 2020, his ownership stood at about 36%.
Then, he went on a buying spree. Following the purchase of 480,000 Asana shares in June, Moskovitz’s ownership swelled to 111.4 million shares, representing over 51% of outstanding stock. In March, Asana disclosed that Moskovitz had a trading plan to buy up to 30 million more of its Class A shares this year, sending the stock up almost 19% the next day.
“It’s been a wild two years in the market and there have been some interesting buying opportunities,” Moskovitz said in an interview with CNBC.
Even after rallying 66% this year, Asana shares are more than 80% below their record high from late 2021.
For Moskovitz, who has a net worth over $12 billion — mostly from his early stake in Facebook, now Meta — becoming majority owner of Asana isn’t about control. Rather, he sees it as the best way to invest to support his philanthropy.
In 2010, Moskovitz signed the Giving Pledge, a promise by some of the wealthiest people in the world to donate most of their fortunes to charity. Moskovitz and his wife, former journalist Cari Tuna, dole out their funds through Good Ventures, based on recommendations from Open Philanthropy.
When it comes to spending that money, there’s no greater concern to Moskovitz than the future of artificial intelligence.
Good Ventures donated $30 million to startup OpenAI over a three-year period in 2017, long before generative AI or ChatGPT had entered the public lexicon. OpenAI, which is now worth about $30 billion, was started as a nonprofit, and Open Philanthropy said at the time it wanted “to help play a role in OpenAI’s approach to safety and governance issues.”
One of the 10 focus areas Open Philanthropy lists on its website is “potential risks from advanced AI.” The organization recommended a $5 million grant to the National Science Foundation to back research on methods of guaranteeing the safety of artificial intelligence systems, and $5.56 million to the University of California at Berkeley for “the creation of an academic center focused on AI safety.” In total, Open Philanthropy says it’s given over $300 million in the focus area through more than 170 grants.
“I definitely think there’s a big risk there — something I spend a lot of time thinking about,” Moskovitz said.
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University in 2004. He became a billionaire after Facebook’s 2012 initial public offering, holding more shares than any individual other than Zuckerberg.
Even after snapping up additional Asana shares in 2022 and 2023, his ownership sits at about $2.6 billion, less than the $4.6 billion in Facebook stock he owns, according to FactSet.
“I’m just in a unique position, where I came to the table with an existing source of wealth,” Moskovitz said. “So even things that look like gigantic purchases, it’s still a relatively normal sort of portion of my net worth relative to other founders.”
Moskovitz has agreed not to buy all outstanding Asana shares or even acquire ownership of 90% of the common stock. He will also keep a majority of its directors independent, in compliance with the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, according to a filing.
Moskovitz declined to talk about whether he was buying up shares to prevent activist investors from coming in and trying to force change. Activists have been busy in the cloud software space, most notably at Salesforce, which responded to pressure by expanding its buyback program and bolstering profits.
Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appears for testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in Washington, D.C., May 16, 2023.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
Recently, Moskovitz’s worlds collided.
OpenAI vaulted from niche startup to the hottest thing in tech after releasing ChatGPT in November. Before that, Moskovitz was playing around with the company’s DALL-E technology for converting text into images. He said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman set him up with a “labs account” in April of last year.
Following the ChatGPT launch, Moskovitz had some fun asking the chatbot to come up with objectives to help deal with California’s housing problem.
Meanwhile, Asana joined the parade of companies that announced enhancements to their products with generative AI features that could take human input and present text, images or audio in response. Earlier this month, Asana said it had given some clients access to several generative AI features powered by OpenAI’s models.
“Chat is just one paradigm for how you use these technologies,” Moskovitz told CNBC. “When you’re integrating them into workflows like work management, doing things like optimizing automation workflows or helping to make decisions — you can literally ask questions of the system and it’ll give you a summary and a recommendation.”
Moskovitz said more complicated tasks, such as adding structure to projects, is where “it really sorts of takes off in potential.” Rather than just asking for specific answers, he said the power is in the technology to take “a bunch of information and sort of a vague goal” and then “give you something approximately in the right direction.”
Asana could spend $5 million or more on OpenAI’s technology next year, Moskovitz said, adding he was “very impressed by GPT-3,” the company’s prior large language model, “and was even more impressed by GPT-4,” which was announced in March.
Moskovitz took six minutes out of Asana’s 51-minute earnings call in early June to tout the company’s approach to AI. He used the acronym 41 times, compared with 32 AI references by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on his company’s earnings call in April. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor.
Asana is “just personally deeply connected to the AI labs that are leading the way,” Moskovitz said.
The links are, in fact, quite deep. Altman invested in Asana in 2016. On Asana’s earnings call, Moskovitz reminded analysts that his company and OpenAI “share a board member in Adam D’Angelo,” a former Facebook technology chief who later started online Q-and-A startup Quora.
Moskovitz invested in AI startup Anthropic in 2021, the same year he co-invested with Altman in nuclear fusion startup Helion.
Similar to Altman, Moskovitz is also deeply bullish on AI and worried about the damage it can cause.
Moskovitz was one of many entrepreneurs who signed a statement in May, saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The missive came from the nonprofit Center for AI Safety.
But Moskovitz wasn’t among the signatories of the nonprofit Future of Life Institute’s open letter in March that called on AI labs to press pause on training the most sophisticated AI models for six months or more. Near the top of that list of signees was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early backer of OpenAI who has warned we should be very concerned about advanced AI, calling it “a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine.”
Moskovitz said Musk’s fears aren’t completely overblown and that they both want “to bring this technology into the world in a safe way.”
“Elon kind of comes at it from multiple angles,” he said. “I think we sort of share the view about potential existential risk issues, and maybe don’t share the view as much about AI censorship and wokeism and stuff like that.”
In December, Musk tweeted that “the danger of training AI to be woke — in other words, lie — is deadly.”
Moskovitz has helped craft a 12-point list of possible policy changes for U.S. lawmakers to consider.
“The thing I’m most interested in is making sure that state-of-the-art later generations, like GPT-5, GPT-6, get run through safety evaluations before being released into the world,” he said. “I think that will require regulation to coordinate all the players.”
He even made up a word, in a tweet last month, to express his convoluted views.
“Excito-nervous for AI!” he wrote.
Correction: This story has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to the founders of Anthropic.
WATCH: Elon Musk creates A.I. startup called X.AI to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT
The logo for the Food and Drug Administration is seen ahead of a news conference on removing synthetic dyes from America’s food supply, at the Health and Human Services Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 22, 2025.
Nathan Posner | Anadolu | Getty Images
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published a warning letter addressed to the wrist wearable company Whoop, alleging it is marketing a new blood pressure feature without proper approvals.
The letter centers around Whoop’s Blood Pressure Insights (BPI) feature, which the company introduced alongside its latest hardware launch in May.
Whoop said its BPI feature uses blood pressure information to offer performance and wellness insights that inform consumers and improve athletic performance.
But the FDA said Tuesday that Whoop’s BPI feature is intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease — a key distinction that would reclassify the wellness tracker as a “medical device” that has to undergo a rigorous testing and approval processes.
“Providing blood pressure estimation is not a low-risk function,” the FDA said in the letter. “An erroneously low or high blood pressure reading can have significant consequences for the user.”
A Whoop spokesperson said the company’s system offers only a single daily estimated range and midpoint, which distinguishes it from medical blood pressure devices used for diagnosis or management of high blood pressure.
Whoop users who purchase the $359 “Whoop Life” subscription tier can use the BPI feature to get daily insights about their blood pressure, including estimated systolic and diastolic ranges, according to the company.
Whoop also requires users to log three traditional cuff-readings to act as a baseline in order to unlock the BPI feature.
Additionally, the spokesperson said the BPI data is not unlike other wellness metrics that the company deals with. Just as heart rate variability and respiratory rate can have medical uses, the spokesperson said, they are permitted in a wellness context too.
“We believe the agency is overstepping its authority in this case by attempting to regulate a non-medical wellness feature as a medical device,” the Whoop spokesperson said.
High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is the number one risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and other types of cardiovascular disease, according to Dr. Ian Kronish, an internist and co-director of Columbia University’s Hypertension Center.
Kronish told CNBC that wearables like Whoop are a big emerging topic of conversation among hypertension experts, in part because there’s “concern that these devices are not yet proven to be accurate.”
If patients don’t get accurate blood pressure readings, they can’t make informed decisions about the care they need.
At the same time, Kronish said wearables like Whoop present a “big opportunity” for patients to take more control over their health, and that many professionals are excited to work with these tools.
Understandably, it can be confusing for consumers to navigate. Kronish encouraged patients to talk with their doctor about how they should use wearables like Whoop.
“It’s really great to hear that the FDA is getting more involved around informing consumers,” Kronish said.
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seen in Silver Spring, Maryland November 4, 2009.
Jason Reed | Reuters
Whoop is not the only wearable manufacturer that’s exploring blood pressure monitoring.
Omron and Garmin both offer medical blood pressure monitoring with on-demand readings that fall under FDA regulation. Samsung also offers blood-pressure-reading technology, but it is not available in the U.S. market.
Apple has also been teasing a blood pressure sensor for its watches, but has not been able to deliver. In 2024, the tech giant received FDA approval for its sleep apnea detection feature.
Whoop has previously received FDA clearance for its ECG feature, which is used to record and analyze a heart’s electrical activity to detect potential irregularities in rhythm. But when it comes to blood pressure, Whoop believes the FDA’s perspective is antiquated.
“We do not believe blood pressure should be considered any more or less sensitive than other physiological metrics like heart rate and respiratory rate,” a spokesperson said. “It appears that the FDA’s concerns may stem from outdated assumptions about blood pressure being strictly a clinical domain and inherently associated with a medical diagnosis.”
The FDA said Whoop could be subject to regulatory actions like seizure, injunction, and civil money penalties if it fails to address the violations that the agency identified in its letter.
Whoop has 15 business days to respond with steps the company has taken to address the violations, as well as how it will prevent similar issues from happening again.
“Even accounting for BPI’s disclaimers, they do not change this conclusion, because they are insufficient to outweigh the fact that the product is, by design, intended to provide a blood pressure estimation that is inherently associated with the diagnosis of a disease or condition,” the FDA said.
WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary
United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation stands ready for launch on pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 5, 2023 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States.
Paul Hennessey | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
As Amazon chases SpaceX in the internet satellite market, the e-commerce and computing giant is now counting on Elon Musk’s rival company to get its next batch of devices into space.
On Wednesday, weather permitting, 24 Kuiper satellites will hitch a ride on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets from a launchpad on Florida’s Space Coast. A 27-minute launch window for the mission, dubbed “KF-01,” opens at 2:18 a.m. ET.
The launch will be livestreamed on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.
The mission marks an unusual alliance. SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.
Amazon launched Project Kuiper in 2019 with an aim to provide broadband internet from a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company is working under a tight deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission that requires it to have about 1,600 satellites in orbit by the end of July 2026.
Amazon’s first two Kuiper launches came in April and June, sending 27 satellites each time aboard rockets supplied by United Launch Alliance.
Assuming Wednesday’s launch is a success, Amazon will have a total of 78 satellites in orbit. In order to meet the FCC’s tight deadline, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy satellites, securing a hefty amount of capacity from rocket providers. Kuiper has booked up to 83 launches, including three rides with SpaceX.
Space has emerged as a battleground between Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, two of the world’s richest men. Aside from Kuiper, Bezos also competes with Musk via his rocket company Blue Origin.
Blue Origin in January sent up its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time, which is intended to rival SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets. While Blue Origin currently trails SpaceX, Bezos last year predicted his latest venture will one day be bigger than Amazon, which he started in 1994.
Kuiper has become one of Amazon’s biggest bets, with more than $10 billion earmarked for the project. The company may need to spend as much as $23 billion to build its full constellation, analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note to clients last week. That figure doesn’t include the cost of building terminals, which consumers will use to connect to the service.
The analysts estimate Amazon is spending $150 million per launch this year, while satellite production costs are projected to total $1.1 billion by the fourth quarter.
Amazon is going after a market that’s expected to grow to at least $40 billion by 2030, the analysts wrote, citing estimates by Boston Consulting Group. The firm estimated that Amazon could generate $7.1 billion in sales from Kuiper by 2032 if it claims 30% of the market.
“With Starlink’s solid early growth, our estimates could be conservative,” the analysts wrote.
WATCH: Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites into space
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