Mark Zuckerberg net worth
Number of divisions: 24
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth and salary?
Mark Zuckerberg is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist with a net worth of US$129 billion. At the time of writing, this makes Mark the third richest person on the planet. Among the top 100 richest people in the world, Mark is the youngest. In the top 30, he is the youngest in more than a decade.
Perhaps not surprisingly, most of Mark’s wealth is attributed to his shares in Facebook. Mark currently owns about 400 million Facebook shares, divided into different categories with different voting rights. He owns approximately 12 million Facebook A shares and 365 million B shares, accounting for approximately 81% of all B shares. Through these B super voting shares, Mark owns 53% of the company’s voting rights. Technically, Mark also controls the class B voting rights of co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, so Mark owns about 58% of the company’s total voting rights. Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth exceeded $100 billion for the first time on August 7, 2020.
early life
Mark Elliott Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. His father Edward was a dentist and his mother Karen was a psychiatrist. He has three sisters, Randy, Donna and Ariel. Mark and his sisters grew up in Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County, New York. When he finished his Bar Mitzvah when he was 12 years old, it had the theme of “Star Wars”.
In middle school, Zuckerberg started using computers and writing software. His father taught him BASIC programming in the 1990s and later hired software developer David Newman to coach him privately.
Zuckerberg attended Azley High School as a freshman and sophomore. In his junior and senior years, he attended Phillips Exeter College, where he had excellent academic performance and won awards in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and classical studies. He is the captain of the fencing team at Philip Exeter Academy. In high school, he took graduate courses in BASIC at Mercy College. He also developed a software program called “ZuckNet” to connect all the computers in Zuckerberg’s home with the computers in his father’s dental office. It works very similarly to AOL’s Instant Messenger, which made its debut in the second year after Mark established ZuckNet. Zuckerberg also made a music player called Synapse Media Player when he was in high school. The media player understands the user’s listening habits. AOL tried to acquire Synapse and hired Zuckerberg. Microsoft also bid millions of dollars to acquire Synapse and tried to hire Zuckerberg. In the fall of 2002, he did not sell, but entered Harvard.
Harvard
When he arrived at Harvard, Zuckerberg had already enjoyed the reputation of a programming prodigy. He studied psychology and computer science. He is a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi Brotherhood and the Kirkland family. Zuckerberg wrote the CourseMatch program during his sophomore year. Users can select classes according to the choices of other students, or form study groups. Soon after, he created Facemash to let users choose the best-looking person from a set of photos. The website overwhelmed Harvard’s servers during the first weekend it went live, so much so that the university shut it down.
The following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began to write code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg and his classmates Dustin Moskowitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin launched “Thefacebook” in the Harvard dormitory, originally located at thefacebook.com.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to work on Facebook. He received an honorary degree in 2017.
(Photo courtesy of Ludovic MARIN/AFP)
In the spring of 2004, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and some friends moved to Palo Alto, California, where they rented a small house as Facebook’s office. In the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel of the investment company. Initially, the team planned to return to Harvard, but decided to stay in California. They have turned down the takeover offer of a large company. In April 2009, Zuckerberg sought advice from Peter Currie, the chief financial officer of Netscape, on Facebook’s financing strategy. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company’s users had reached the 500 million mark. Of course, today, Facebook is a huge social network that makes Mark Zuckerberg one of the richest people in the world.
salary
Mark Zuckerberg’s annual salary is $1. This is not a typo. Many executives like Zuckerberg choose to give themselves low salaries in order to increase the company’s profits as much as possible. When the company maximizes its profits, the overall value of its holdings will increase, and this is the source of real wealth for executives. Executives such as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin earn only $1 a year!
Net worth details
Facebook’s initial public offering on May 18, 2012, was approximately US$38 per share. Mark owns 400 million Facebook shares. This means that at the time of the initial public offering, he ended the day with a net book value of approximately $15 billion.
Mark has pledged to donate 99% of his wealth during his lifetime. In September 2017, he announced a plan to regularly sell most of his shares to fund his foundation CZI (Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative). His 2018 stock sales generated $5.3 billion worth of proceeds. In 2019, he sold Facebook stock worth $1.86 billion.
Legal Issues
Harvard students Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, claiming that Zuckerberg deliberately convinced them that he would help them build their website idea, HarvardConnection.com, a social network, which was later renamed ConnectU. Countless lawsuits followed. The case was settled on June 25, 2008, and as a result, they received 1.2 million common shares and a cash payment of 20 million U.S. dollars. If these stocks are still owned today, their value will exceed $200 million. The Winklevoss brothers sold at least part of these stocks to fund their investment in Bitcoin. They own so many bitcoins that in December 2017, their total crypto assets were worth more than 1 billion U.S. dollars.
On April 10 and April 11, 2018, Zuckerberg began to testify to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the use of personal data by Facebook and the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach. Zuckerberg claimed that the entire incident violated the trust between Alexander Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
personal life
Zuckerberg said when filling out the university application that he can read and write French, Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek.
When Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, he met his future wife and classmate Priscilla Chen at a fraternity gathering. They started dating in 2003.
In September 2010, Zuckerberg invited Chen, then a medical student at the University of California, to move into his rented house in Palo Alto. On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg and Chen held an event in Zuckerberg’s backyard to celebrate her graduation from medical school. On December 1, 2015, Zuckerberg announced the birth of their daughter Maxima Chan. In August 2017, they welcomed their second daughter August.
Zuckerberg and Chan are members of The Giving Pledge and philanthropists active through their foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The couple intend to eventually donate 99% of their Facebook shares to the program.
real estate
Zuckerberg and Chen own real estate and land worth about $200 million. Some of their most famous real estate assets include 700 acres in Hawaii, several homes in Palo Alto, and townhouses in San Francisco.
Mark Zuckerberg owns many houses. The main residence he and his family live in is an ordinary 5,000 square foot home in Palo Alto that he bought for $7 million in 2011.
In 2012, Zuckerberg began to purchase four surrounding properties to his home. This cost 43 million U.S. dollars. He leased these houses back to the previous owners and plans to demolish and rebuild them in 2016. However, city officials rejected his plan, so he submitted a new plan to renovate two of the houses and convert the other two into single-story houses to create a compound.
In 2013, he spent $10 million to purchase a 5,500 square foot townhouse in San Francisco. The residence was built in 1928 and occupies 9,800 square feet with 70 feet of sidewalk frontage. He spent more than $1.6 million to renovate the house. According to reports, if it is to remodel a kitchen and a bathroom, it will cost $65,000.
In 2014, Zuckerberg bought two properties in Kauai, Hawaii for $100 million. These properties occupy 750 acres across an isolated Hawaiian beach. In 2017, he purchased another 89 acres of land nearby for more than 45 million U.S. dollars.
In 2018, Zuckerberg spent US$59 million to acquire two private waterfront estates adjacent to Lake Tahoe. Between the two properties, Zuckerberg owns 600 feet of private waterfront on Lake Tahoe.
