Zuckerberg sold them for a total of almost $ 4.6 billion before taxes.
Zuckerberg's stake in Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has dropped to 14.6%. For a year, one of the richest people in the world sold shares in the company for $ 4.6 billion, Chronicle.info reports with reference to Focus.
The CEO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose fortune valued at $ 117 billion, sold Meta shares in 2021 almost every business day and sold them for a total of almost $ 4.6 billion before taxes.
The only month last year when he did not sell shares was December. About 89% of the proceeds, or almost $ 4.1 billion, went to the limited liability company Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which Zuckerberg positions as a charitable foundation. The remaining amount — about $ 495 million, or $ 312 million after taxes, according to Forbes — is the sale of Facebook/Meta shares held by the billionaire's trusts.
Thus, Zuckerberg reduced his stake in Meta from 28 % in 2012, when the company went public, to 14.6% today.
The frequency with which Zuckerberg sold Meta stock last year is not uncommon. Since 2012, Zuckerberg has sold $ 17.4 billion in shares of this company (before taxes). The vast majority of those sales — nearly $ 13.2 billion — were made by CZI as Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan move closer to their 2015 pledge to sell 99% of Facebook during his lifetime. $ 4.6 billion in Facebook sales in 2021 — the second highest annualized amount in 2018, he and CZI sold shares totaling $ 5.3 billion. In 2020, Zuckerberg and CZI sold less than $ 600 million in shares.
Interestingly, many other billionaires have also taken advantage of the jump in stock prices to sell billions of dollars in assets ahead of the expected U.S. tax reform. Jeff Bezos sold over $ 8.8 billion in Amazon shares in 2021, including $ 2 billion in shares in November. Google co-founder Sergey Brin sold tens of millions of dollars worth of Alphabet shares for the first time since 2017 in May. And, perhaps most notably, Elon Musk began selling billions of dollars in Tesla shares in November, claiming that he would pay $ 11 billion in taxes in a year as a result. Back in April, Forbes counted the top 20 billionaires selling stock.
With billions of Zuckerberg's, the CZI, based in Redwood City, California, funds research, education initiatives, and criminal justice reform efforts. The organization says it has provided $ 2.9 billion in grants since 2015 and invested $ 150 million in commercial ventures. In 2016, CZI made a bold bet: within ten years, it will spend $ 3 billion to treat all diseases.
It is worth noting that since the Fund is organized as a limited liability company, it is not required to disclose information about its financial operations or salaries of top managers. In addition, he can invest money in other private companies set up to make money, as well as make money on innovation and development.
At the moment, Zuckerberg took a break from transactions. It did not sell a single share in December and did not resume selling in January 2022. In an annual letter to CZI published in December, Zuckerberg and Chan stated that the organization will focus on «developing technologies to improve our biological understanding of the human body» over the next decade. This includes the creation of an Institute for Advanced Biomedical Imaging and a center at Harvard University working on the use of AI and machine learning in biology and medicine.