Mark Zuckerberg currently has a net worth of $71.6 billion and is the fifth richest person in the world according to Forbes. His wealth was created by his personal ownership stake in the company Facebook that he built.
Mark Zuckerberg founded TheFacebook in his Harvard University dorm room on February 4th 2004 and lead its growth to one of the biggest companies in the world as its chairman and chief executive officer. TheFacebook originally started at Harvard as that university’s online facebook listing all the students. The website was then gradually opened to other big colleges in phases. Later the company name was shortened to just Facebook and was eventually opened to people outside college as it scaled with more users.
Zuckerberg rejected a $75 million offer by Viacom in 2006 to buy Facebook. Later in 2006, Yahoo! made an offer to buy Facebook for $1 billion and Zuckerberg turned down that offer as well. That year BusinessWeek was giving the company a $2 billion valuation.
In 2007 Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake for $240 million which put the Facbook valuation at $15 billion. After that new Facebook valuation and the ownership that Zuckerberg still had in the the company he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever at the age of 23 years old.
In 2009 a lower valued 2% ownership was sold to Digital Sky Technologies for $200 million dropping the valuation a little.
By 2011 the company was being valued at $50 billion according to investment reports.
Facebook had one billion worldwide users by the year 2012. Facebook was taken public on May 18, 2012 with its Initial Public Offering. Mark Zuckerberg still held the majority of shares when it went public. Zuckerberg continued to have a 22% ownership of total stock in Facebook and still owned 57% of all the voting shares. The Facebook IPO was one of the biggest in the history of the tech sector and the largest initial public offering in Internet history.
He is also a co-founder and board member of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot.
Zuckerberg and his wife promised in 2015 to donate 99% of their net wealth to charities in their lifetimes. Their money has been placed in a limited liability corporation that they both own and control. They focus their philanthropic donations to “Advancing human potential and promoting equality”.
His investment portfolio holds $211 million invested in Panorama Education, Vicarious, AltSchool, MasteryConnect and Asana.
In 2011 Zuckerberg purchased a $7 million house in Palo Alto, California. There is speculation that Zuckerburg purchased all the homes surrounding his in 2013 for a total of $30 million through Iconiq Capital.
Mark Zuckerberg built his net worth by retaining a large percentage of ownership in Facebook and then turning it into one of the biggest companies in the world through great acquisitions like Instagram, Oculus, and What’s App. The real power of Facebook is the like button he introduced and the profile information users give it, with this data he has created the most targeted advertising platform in history. On Facebook the ads for products you want to see find you, and Facebook has monetized this.
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