Haitian-born billionaire Herriot Tabuteau sells $10.5 million in Axsome shares before earnings

Herriot Tabuteau, the Haitian-born founder and chief executive of Axsome Therapeutics, sold about $10.5 million of stock in the company on Aug. 5 and Aug. 6, three days before the biopharmaceutical group reports second-quarter results.

The sales came out of options that were about to run out. Tabuteau exercised 45,004 options at $4.95 a share on Aug. 5 and sold the same number the same day at a weighted average of $212.01, in open market transactions priced between $209.28 and $216.35. He exercised a further 4,660 options at the same price the next day and sold them at a weighted average of $213.95, with individual prices between $212.41 and $216.36.

The options were granted on March 15, 2017 and were reaching their 10-year expiry. Exercising all 49,664 cost him roughly $245,800, against gross proceeds of about $10.54 million, leaving a net of approximately $10.29 million, a Billionaires.Africa calculation based on the disclosed prices. Both tranches were sold through Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC under Form 144 notices filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The transactions ran under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted in advance, which the filings state has now been completed. Plans of that kind set the timing and size of sales ahead of execution, so trades run automatically regardless of what the company discloses afterwards.

Tabuteau is left holding 7,229 shares directly and is the deemed indirect beneficial owner of 7,344,500 shares held through an entity over which he exercises voting and dispositive power. The combined 7,351,729 shares represent about 14.3 percent of the 51,459,766 shares Axsome listed as outstanding, and were worth roughly $1.56 billion at the $212.74 price the stock carried when the filings were reported, a Billionaires.Africa calculation.

This was his third sale of the year on the same pattern. He sold 49,670 shares on June 9 at an average of $241.01, raising $11.97 million, and 49,666 shares on July 1 at an average of $240.25, raising $11.93 million. The three disposals total 149,000 shares and about $34.4 million in gross proceeds, a Billionaires.Africa calculation.

The prices tell their own story about the stock's recent path. Axsome closed at $241.53 on July 23, giving it a market value of $12.43 billion. It had fallen to $212.74 by the time the August filings were reported, a decline of close to 12 percent in a little over two weeks, though the shares are still up roughly 103 percent over 12 months.

Axsome reports second-quarter results on Monday before the U.S. market opens, with a management call at 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Tabuteau founded the New York company in January 2012 and took it public on Nasdaq in November 2015, where it traded below $10 for years while investors stayed unconvinced by its focus on central nervous system disorders, a field with high failure rates. The turn came in August 2022, when Auvelity won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for major depressive disorder. The shares jumped 65 percent in a week.

The larger move followed this year, after Auvelity was approved for agitation associated with Alzheimer's disease, a market of more than 7 million Americans. Axsome booked $709 million in revenue over the 12 months through the first quarter, up 64 percent from a year earlier. Tabuteau has said he expects the Auvelity franchise alone to reach $8 billion in peak annual sales, raised from an earlier projection of $6 billion.

The pipeline has continued to expand. The FDA accepted a New Drug Application for AXS-12 in July, for cataplexy in narcolepsy patients, setting a target action date of May 1, 2027 and indicating no advisory committee meeting is planned. Axsome has also begun two pivotal trials, FOCUS-2 and FOCUS-3, testing solriamfetol in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Tabuteau's route into drug development was unusual. Born in Haiti and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side, he trained at Yale School of Medicine and then spent close to two decades in healthcare finance, including at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Securities and as a partner at the hedge fund Healthco, tied to S.A.C. Capital, where he ran biotechnology, genomics and instrumentation portfolios.

He became the first person born in Haiti to appear on the Forbes global billionaires list in April 2025, entering at $1.1 billion and placing 21st on the magazine's ranking of the world's Black billionaires, tied with the Jamaican-Canadian investor Michael Lee-Chin. Forbes put his fortune at $2.2 billion in July after the Axsome rally and has named him to its list of the 250 most successful living immigrants in America. He ranks 2,600th on the 2026 billionaires list.

Analysts covering the stock have kept price targets well above where it trades. H.C. Wainwright reiterated a buy rating with a $290 target after the AXS-12 acceptance, Piper Sandler held an overweight rating at $258, RBC Capital raised its target to $304 in July and Mizuho trimmed its own to $306 from $310.