SoFi Stock Rises After Hours as CEO Noto Buys Shares Following Short-seller Attack

NightAirdropper · 2026-03-18T08:41:03+00:00

SoFi Technologies CEO Anthony Noto purchased $500,000 worth of company stock despite allegations from short-seller Muddy Waters Research, which claimed there were significant financial problems. This purchase demonstrates Noto's confidence in the company's stock.

NightAirdropper

2026-03-18 08:41:03

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Investing.com - SoFi Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFI) stock rose 1% after hours on Tuesday, following CEO Anthony Noto’s purchase of $500,000 worth of company shares after the close.

According to Form 4 filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Noto bought 28,900 shares at an average price of $17.3189 today.

This purchase occurred after short-selling firm Muddy Waters Research announced it was shorting the company, which saw its stock drop over 4% intraday and close down 1.3%.

Muddy Waters described SoFi as “a financial engineering treadmill rather than a healthy growing lending business.” The firm accused the company of ongoing dilution of shareholders to enable management to achieve bonus targets through loan valuation and off-balance-sheet structures that disguise debt as income.

The short seller claimed that SoFi has at least $312 million in unrecorded debt. Muddy Waters calculated SoFi’s personal loan charge-off rate at about 6.1%, compared to the company’s reported 2.89%.

Muddy Waters stated that the reported $1.054 billion EBITDA was inflated by manipulating charge-off rates, subsidized vendor financing sales, unrecorded borrowings, off-balance-sheet loan structures that record loan income as fees, and capitalization of marketing expenses excluded from core metrics, totaling approximately $950 million.

The firm said SoFi’s student loan business appears primarily designed to generate fair value gains for management bonuses. Muddy Waters described the lending platform as a form of forward funding transaction involving wet capital, a disguised borrowing method, with SoFi recording loan income as fee income.

According to Muddy Waters, management locked in $58 million in gains through tools equivalent to stock sales while publicly claiming not to have sold any shares.

Noto’s purchase signals a vote of confidence in the stock amid the short seller attack.

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