According to data from the Security and Exchange Commission, Mark Zuckerberg has been selling Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shares every day since November 9, 2020. In those eight months through Wednesday, he has sold approximately 9.4 million stocks worth $2.8 billion.
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Not Buying Stocks For a Year
The vast majority of the sales –about 90%– have been made by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), his philanthropic organization, while the other 10% were made from his own portfolio. According to Forbes, “roughly $200 million, after taxes, went into his own pockets.”
What is drawing attention is that Zuckerberg has done so after stopping for a whole year.
Before selling his shares again, he had donated several thousand shares –close to $2 billion– to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), a group that helps advance technological solutions developed by the brightest brains of the technological mecca.
A CZI spokesperson did not give any details as to why Zuckerberg had stopped in November 2019 and then continued selling a year later. However, the person assured that Zuckerberg’s sales “are conducted through pre-determined plans filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”
Forbes estimates that Zuckerberg has been able to coup $2 billion himself since selling stocks in 2012 for the first time.
Not a Single Dent
Facebook, a furious target of the U.S. antitrust bill has been barely dented by unfair competition accusations and lawsuits. The monopoly accusations have in fact turned out great for the company.
In late June, Facebook’s market capitalization topped $1 trillion after a Washington judge had dropped monopoly charges brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a combo of 46 states. The company shares jumped 4.2% to 355.64 by the end of the session.
Selling shares is often common among business leaders, for strategic purposes. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is also selling quite a few stocks, while other billionaires are doing the same. The high price of the stock influences these sales to generate immediate massive profits, and as long as the company has control, it can reap great benefits from these exchanges.
Still, as informed by Forbes, Zuckerberg has unloaded way fewer Facebook stocks in dollars than Bezos has sold of Amazon Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) in total. “Since Amazon went public in 1997, Forbes calculated that Bezos has sold nearly $27 billion worth of Amazon shares (before taxes).”
Facebook and Amazon are part of the Entrepreneur Index, which tracks 60 of the largest publicly traded companies managed by their founders or their founders’ families.
