Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth

Last Updated on January 15, 2024 by Ben

Tech entrepreneur and humanitarian Mark Zuckerberg is worth $80 billion. Mark Zuckerberg has been one of the wealthiest people in the world for most of the last ten years.

Mark is the youngest of the top 100 wealthiest people in the world and the youngest in the top 30 by over a decade. Most of Mark’s wealth comes from his shares on Facebook, which is probably not a big surprise.

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Mark owns about 400 million Facebook shares, split into different classes with different voting rights. He owns about 12 million Facebook Class A shares and 365 million Facebook Class B shares, which is about 81% of all the Class B shares.

Mark has 53% of the voting power in the company through these Class B super-voting shares. Mark also has control over Dustin Moskovitz’s Class B voting rights, so he has about 58% of the total voting power in the company.

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Wealth Milestones

On August 7, 2020, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth went over $100 billion for the first time. Late in 2021, his net worth reached a high point of $137 billion, making him the third richest person on Earth.

His wealth was $126 billion on January 1, 2022, and he was the fifth richest person in the world.
Over the next few months, Mark’s luck worsened as Facebook’s stock price fell by 70%, from around $340 to $100 per share.

At the end of April, his net worth was $65 billion, which was $60 billion less than in early January.

By the end of October, he was worth $37 billion, $100 billion less than a year before and $89 billion less than on January 1. No other billionaire had lost that much money at the same time. Because of this, Mark went from being the third wealthiest person in the world to being #30.

Early Life

On May 14, 1984, White Plains, New York, welcomed Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. Edward, his father, is a dentist, and Karen, his mother, is a therapist. Randi, Donna, and Arielle are the names of his three sisters. Mark and his sisters grew up in Westchester County, in Dobbs Ferry, New York. When he was 12, he had a “Star Wars”-themed Bar Mitzvah.

Zuckerberg began to use computers and write software in middle school. In the 1990s, his father taught him BASIC programming, and then he hired software writer David Newman to teach him independently.

Zuckerberg spent his first and second years at Ardsley High School. He went to Phillips Exeter Academy for his junior and senior years, where he did well in school and won prizes in physics, math, astronomy, and classical studies. He led the team of fencers at Phillip Exeter Academy.

He took a BASIC course at Mercy College at the graduate level while still in high school. He also made a software called “ZuckNet” that connected all the computers in the Zuckerbergs’ home with the ones in his dad’s dental office. It worked in a way that was similar to AOL’s Instant Messenger, which came out a year after Mark built ZuckNet.

In high school, Zuckerberg also made a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The media player found out what the user liked to listen to. AOL tried to buy Synapse and get Zuckerberg to work there. Microsoft also bid for Synapse worth a few million dollars and tried to hire Zuckerberg. He didn’t sell, and in the fall of 2002, he went to Harvard.

Harvard

By the time he got to Harvard, Zuckerberg was known as a genius when it came to programming. He went to school to learn about psychology and computers and lived in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity in the Kirkland house.

In his second year of high school, Zuckerberg wrote the program CourseMatch. Users could choose classes based on what other students chose, and they could also get together to study.

Long after that, he made Facemash, which let people choose the most attractive person from a group of pictures. When the site went live for the first time, it caused so much traffic that Harvard had to shut it down.

By the time he got to Harvard, Zuckerberg was known as a genius when it came to programming. He went to school to learn about psychology and computers and lived in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity in the Kirkland house.

In his second year of high school, Zuckerberg wrote the program CourseMatch. Users could choose classes based on what other students chose, and they could also get together to study.

Long after that, he made Facemash, which let people choose the most attractive person from a group of pictures. When the site went live for the first time, it caused so much traffic that Harvard had to shut it down.

In January 2004, at the start of the next school year, Zuckerberg began writing the code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg and three other Harvard students—Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin—started “Thefacebook,” first founded at thefacebook.com.

Zuckerberg quit Harvard after his second year so he could work on Facebook. In 2017, he was given an honors degree.

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Facebook

In March 2004, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and friends rented a tiny house in Palo Alto, California, to use as Facebook’s workplace. Zuckerberg met investor Peter Thiel in the summer. Instead of returning to Harvard, the gang stayed in California.

They rejected significant corporate proposals to buy the company. Zuckerberg consulted former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about Facebook finance in April 2009. Zuckerberg announced 500 million users on July 21, 2010.

Today, Facebook is a vast social network that has made Mark Zuckerberg one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

Facebook IPO

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012, and each share cost about $38. Mark owns 400,000,000 Facebook shares. So, at the end of the IPO day, he had a “paper net worth” of about $15 billion.

Salary

Mark Zuckerberg gets $1 a year as pay. It’s not a mistake. Many leaders, like Zuckerberg, take low salaries to make as much money as possible for the company. When a company tries to make as much money as possible, the general value of its stock holdings goes up.

This is where the real wealth of the executive comes from. Executives like Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin only get paid $1 annually!

Philanthropy

Mark has promised to give away 99 percent of his money while alive. In September 2017, he said he would sell pieces of his shares monthly to pay for his foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). In 2018, he sold shares that brought in $5.3 billion. In 2019, he sold Facebook shares worth $1.86 billion.

Legal Issues

In their lawsuit against Zuckerberg, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss allege that he deceived them into believing that he would assist them in establishing HarvardConnection.com. This social network was later renamed ConnectU.

There were then a lot of cases. The case was settled on June 25, 2008. They got 1.2 million common shares and $20 million in cash as part of the deal. Those shares are worth more than $200 million if owned. The Winklevoss brothers sold some shares to pay for their Bitcoin purchases.

They own so much Bitcoin that their total crypto assets were worth more than $1 billion in December 2017.

On April 10 and 11, 2018, Zuckerberg started testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about how Facebook uses personal information about the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data breach. Zuckerberg said that the whole thing was a breach of trust between Cambridge Analytica, Aleksandr Kogan, and Facebook.

Personal Life

Zuckerberg said on his college forms that he could read and write in French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.

In his second year at Harvard, Zuckerberg met his future wife, Priscilla Chan, at a house party. In 2003, they went out together.

Zuckerberg asked Chan, a medical student at the University of California, to move into the house he rented in Palo Alto in September 2010. Zuckerberg and Chan married in Zuckerberg’s backyard on May 19, 2012. The event also marked Chan’s graduation from medical school. On December 1, 2015, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg (“Max”) was born. August was born in 2017.

Zuckerberg and Chan are both members of The Giving Pledge, and through their organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, they do a lot of good work in the world. The couple plans to give 99% of their Facebook shares to the Initiative.

Real Estate

Zuckerberg and Chan own real estate and land around the world worth about $200 million. Some of their most important properties are 1400 acres in Hawaii, a San Francisco townhouse, and several Palo Alto houses.

Mark Zuckerberg and his family live in a simple Palo Alto house with 5,000 square feet that he bought for $7 million in 2011. But he also owns the other “modest” houses around this one, making a private compound. In 2012, Zuckerberg started buying the four homes around his house, spending $43 million buying homes in the area.

He then rented the homes back to those who had owned them before, planning to tear them down and build new ones finally. But city officials didn’t like his plan, so he devised a new one to fix up two homes and build single-story homes for the other two.

In 2013, he paid $10 million for a home in San Francisco with 5,500 square feet. The house was built in 1928 and sits on a 9,800-square-foot lot with 70 feet of sidewalk frontage. He fixed up the house with more than $1.6 million if that was spent on redoing the kitchen and one bathroom, sixty-five thousand dollars.

In 2014, Zuckerberg spent $100 million to buy two homes on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. On a remote stretch of a Hawaiian beach, these homes cover 750 acres. In 2017, he paid more than $45 million for another 89 acres nearby. In January 2022, he bought another 100 acres, bringing the total number of acres he owned on Kauai to 1,400.

In 2018, Zuckerberg spent $59 million on two private waterfront homes on Lake Tahoe, and they are right next to each other. Zuckerberg has 600 feet of private lakefront on Lake Tahoe between his two homes.

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Pros and Cons of Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth

Pros

  • Mark Zuckerberg is worth over $90 billion, making him the sixth wealthiest person in the world. This allows him to access unprecedented amounts of capital which can be used to fund projects that aim to make the world a better place.
  • He champions immigration reform, criminal justice reform, and LGBTQ rights using his wealth and position. He is a member of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
  • He has been able to use his wealth to purchase real estate worldwide so that he can travel freely with his family. This includes homes in California, Hawaii, and Lake Tahoe.

Cons

  • With such significant amounts of wealth comes great responsibility, and Mark has to be careful about how he spends his money. He had received criticism for some of his past investments, such as when he invested in a company that invests in private prisons.
  • Some have also criticized him for using his wealth to purchase private islands and get access to exclusive clubs and resorts around the world. In contrast, millions of people worldwide struggle to get necessities.
  • There is a significant wealth disparity between those at the top of the economic hierarchy and everyone else, contributing to an unequal distribution of resources and unequal levels of income.
  • Finally, there has been some controversy surrounding Facebook’s practices with user data and their involvement in political activities such as disinformation campaigns.

Final Thought – Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth reflects his immense success, but it raises more significant issues about our society’s concentration of wealth and power. Despite his wealth, many criticisms can be made about how he has used it to benefit himself and those closest to him. Whether you admire or criticize him, it is undeniable that he has significantly influenced the modern world of technology.

However, such concentrated wealth and power could cause distinct issues. Sure, these potential concerns include inequality and breaches of data privacy. The debate over Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth should be part of a larger conversation about ensuring fairness and transparency in our society. It is important to remember that today’s decisions will shape our future and determine what kind of world we want to live in.

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