United Healthcare share price tanks amid outrage at greed after CEO shooting ‘by Luigi Mangione’

United Health Group has seen its share price plummet following the assassination of its well-known CEO and subsequent anger over the healthcare giant’s greed.

The company’s stock price has plummeted by about $45 billion since the Dec. 4 shooting of CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, 26.

Since December 3, the last trading day before Thompson’s death, the share price fell 10 percent, the steepest weekly drop since March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, reports CNN.

And in the week since Thompson’s murder, UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, has seen its stock price drop 8 percent.

Thompson’s murder attracted international attention, including widespread attention to the controversial nature of the U.S. health insurance industry and its unpopular practices.

Analysts say the health care giant losing a well-regarded CEO seen by the market as capable of leading the company likely contributed to the stock’s slump. One of them told CNN that the stock is currently undervalued.

United Healthcare has also suffered a tidal wave of negative publicity, despite the gruesome murder of its former boss, who was a father of two.

Thompson decried his reported approval of a “malicious” AI system that denied 90 percent of patient coverage and primarily targeted the elderly.

Thousands of Americans have accused the company of putting profits over customers’ health, saying UnitedHealth symbolizes everything that’s wrong with for-profit health care.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, was shot dead by a masked gunman outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on December 4

Luigi Mangione faces an extradition hearing Tuesday in Altoona, Pennsylvania

The large losses suffered by UnitedHealth Group since Thompson’s death were discussed by Jeffries stock analyst David Windley, when CNN reported that he told the client that the stock sell-off “seems unwarranted.”

“The shooting was horrifying and the reaction on social media was inhumane,” he added.

He also reportedly told his clients that there was unlikely to be a “regulatory crackdown” on the healthcare sector, despite renewed scrutiny of its practices.

The day after Thompson’s murder, UnitedHealth’s rival BlueCross BlueShield announced a controversial policy in which they would limit the amount of anesthesia for which a patient undergoing surgery would be covered.

A day later, the company reversed the policy.

In response, former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz came under fire when she shared the name and photo of BlueCross BlueShield’s CEO, in an apparent attempt to turn an online mob toward the director.

She wrote, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.”

It was one of many that Lorenz shared on Bluesky, including sharing the response from her group chat.

“Woke up to see this being spammed in my group chats,” Lorenz wrote alongside a celebratory image that read “CEO DOWN.”

“People have a very justified hatred of insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering,” she wrote in another post.

“As someone against death and suffering, I think it is right to expose this broken system and the people in power who make it possible.”

The aftermath of the shooting spawned a number of tasteless reactions, including a lookalike contest for the Manhattan shooter.

Suspected shooter Luigi Mangione was arrested Monday morning at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

He appeared in an extradition court Tuesday afternoon and is fighting efforts to send him back to New York, where he is charged with second-degree murder in the Big Apple, where Thompson was killed.

New York only brings first-degree murder charges under aggravating circumstances – when the victim was a police officer, first responder, witness in a criminal trial, or had been tortured.

Mangione was denied bail and was filmed as he was brought into court saying the charges against him were “an insult to the American people.”

Growing up in a wealthy family, he suffered from debilitating back pain, which required him to undergo extensive surgery in 2023.

Mangione was found with a manifesto that said healthcare executives were “parasites” who “had it coming.”