Key Sentence:
- After a year of not posting claims on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is back on sale.
November 2020, Facebook’s $127 billion founders and CEO dumped stock nearly every business day, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In total, in the eight months ending Wednesday, it sold 9.4 million shares for $2.8 billion.
About 90% of sales are made by his philanthropic and advocacy organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). But, according to Forbes estimates, a small portion – about $200 million in taxes – went into his pocket. Zuckerberg, the fifth most valuable person in the world, has now increased his Facebook stake by about 14%, down 28% during the company’s IPO.
Since Facebook went public in May 2012, Zuckerberg and CZI have sold more than 132 million shares in the social media giant totaling just under $15 billion. Of this, he collects about $2.1 billion in taxes, according to Forbes.
Zuckerberg began selling shares on Facebook in 2016, a year after he and his wife Priscilla Chan founded CZI. At that time, the couple wrote to their unborn daughter promising to distribute 99% of their Facebook shares throughout their lives in education and disease treatment; then, the stock is worth $45 billion. Zuckerberg and CZI’s sales peaked in 2018 when they dropped $5.3 billion worth of stock – mainly through CZI.
But Zuckerberg stopped selling in November 2019 and last year only donated CZI’s donation of 204,700 shares worth $60 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), a California-based nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, under which other nonprofit activities are donations. In 2018, Zuckerberg and Chan donated nearly $2 billion of Facebook shares to SVCF.