Hiroshi Yamauchi, former CEO of Nintendo.
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Nintendo buys back 9.5M shares from the heirs of its former CEO for $1.1B

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

Nintendo announced today that it has paid $1.1 billion to buy 9.5 million shares back from the heirs of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the legendary former chief executive who turned the company into a video game giant.

The family has evidently sold about 67 percent of its stake in Nintendo. That’s a pretty big vote of no confidence for the current Nintendo chief executive, Satoru Iwata. It’s not clear what effect this will have on other shareholders.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.