John Colgrove’s charitable trust stopped holding anythingEverpure, Inc. · NYSE: P · founder, Chief Visionary Officer, director
- What he did
-
12–13 October 2026: sold 200,000 Class A shares for about $30.8m at $151.37–$157.05, out of indirect trust holdings.
13/14 October 2026: gifted 100,000 Class A shares to the Colgrove Family Charitable Remainder Trust, code G at $0; the trust then sold about 91,900 of them across thirteen trades at weighted-average prices of $141.31–$153.68, under a Rule 10b5-1 plan adopted on behalf of the trust on 8 January 2026.
Holdings after: 5,393,309 direct; EEC Irrevocable Trust 2,415,000; RWC Irrevocable Trust 2,415,000; Colgrove Family Living Trust 467,694; charitable remainder trust 0. Everpure is the renamed Pure Storage; the ticker moved from PSTG to P on 17 April 2026.
Contested field: one secondary account dates the gift 13 October with 5,493,309 direct, another dates it 14 October with 5,393,309. The sequence, the entities and the share counts agree across both; the gift date and the direct balance do not. Treated as contested, and nothing below turns on which is right.
- The document
- Form 4 filed 16 October 2026, read against three earlier Forms 4 by the same filer: 29 September 2026 (trade 25 September), 17 August 2026 (trades 13–14 August), and 22 September 2025 (trade 18 September 2025, filed under PSTG).
Consensus read
A founder is giving to charity while diversifying a concentrated position on autopilot. The charitable remainder trust is the philanthropy; the Rule 10b5-1 plan means the timing carries no information about the stock. Financial media will file it in one line: founder sells $30.8m, donates 100,000 shares to charity. Both halves are true and neither is interesting.
Contrarian read
The trust is not functioning as an endowment. It is functioning as a conduit for converting low-basis founder stock into diversified assets without a realization event, and the charitable remainder is the price of the conversion rather than its purpose.
The giveaway is not that the trust sells — a charitable remainder trust is supposed to sell. It is that the trust is loaded with exactly the block it is about to liquidate and emptied to zero within hours, repeatedly, and that this is new behaviour as of August 2026.
Evidence that discriminates
The trust’s own balance history, which separates “a gift held for charitable benefit” from “a pass-through sized to the trade.” Evidence consistent with both readings is left out.
| Date | Received by gift | Sold | Held after |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Sep 2025 | — | 100,000 | 300,000 |
| 13 Aug 2026 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 0 |
| 14 Aug 2026 | 64,815 | 64,815 | 0 |
| 25 Sep 2026 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 0 |
| 13/14 Oct 2026 | 100,000 | ~91,900 | 0 |
A trust holding a gift for charitable benefit accumulates a position; in September 2025 this one did, carrying a 300,000-share corpus after selling. Since August it is sized to the trade and zeroed every time, with the gift quantum matching the sale quantum to the share in three of four cycles.
And the schedule predates every gift. The plan was adopted on behalf of the trust on 8 January 2026, nine months before the October transfer. So the decision to sell was not a trustee responding to stock arriving — it was fixed before the stock arrived. The gift is the step that was timed into the selling plan, not the other way round.
What the document does not say, and I am not asserting. A Form 4 discloses none of the fields that would settle how much actually reaches charity: the payout rate, the term, the remainder beneficiary, or whether this is a CRAT or a CRUT. I am inferring the economic function from the transaction shape alone — strong evidence about the mechanism, weak evidence about intent.
What would falsify me
A Form 990 or trust disclosure showing a payout rate at or near the 5% statutory floor, a named charitable remainder beneficiary, and a short term. That would mean the charitable component dominates the donor-income component and the ordinary reading is simply right.
Equally falsifying: any subsequent cycle in which the trust retains a corpus, makes current distributions to charity, or holds the gifted stock for more than a few sessions.
Pattern vs his own historyDirect holdings 6,478,148 (18 Sep 2025) → 6,074,080 → 6,009,265 (August) → 5,593,309 (25 Sep) → 5,393,309 (October): about 16.7% of the direct position in thirteen months. The plan is renewed annually — a prior one was adopted on behalf of the trust on 7 January 2025, the current one on 8 January 2026.