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Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s 10th-richest person, worth $108 billion, per Bloomberg estimates.
Mark Zuckerberg was once the world’s third-richest person. He’s now fallen to 10th place, but he’s still worth $108 billion, according to estimates by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Meta, which includes Facebook and sister apps Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads among its products alongside Reality Labs, the division that houses its metaverse and VR units.
How did Zuckerberg become a billionaire?
Zuckerberg was a computer nerd from a young age. While at Harvard University, he started social network “The Facebook” with some friends in 2004 as a way to connect students.
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Angel investor Peter Thiel gave him $500,000 in funding in 2004. By the end of the year, Facebook had nearly 1 million users. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2005 to work on it full-time.
In 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, reportedly valuing the company at $87.5 million. The next year, Zuckerberg turned down an offer to sell Facebook to Yahoo for a reported $1 billion.
Other investors piled in, including Microsoft and Goldman Sachs. Zuckerberg then took Facebook public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2012. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the biggest-ever tech IPO at the time and pushing Zuckerberg up the wealth rankings. He became the world’s 29th-richest person.
Facebook built up its empire with a series of major acquisitions in the 2010s, including paying $1 billion for Instagram in 2012, $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, and then $2 billion for Oculus, announced just one month later. Zuckerberg announced the newest member of Meta’s so-called family of apps, Threads – a rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, now known as X – this July.
Zuckerberg’s fortunes are largely tied to Meta’s stock, and his wealth has risen and fallen alongside it. He’s enjoyed spells as the world’s third-richest person, per Bloomberg estimates.
As of March, Zuckerberg owned 15.8% of Meta’s Class A shares and 99.8% of its Class B shares, its most recent proxy statement shows. He controlled 61.1% of the company’s voting shares.
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s salary?
Zuckerberg receives a base salary of just $1 a year from Meta. He also doesn’t get bonuses or equity awards from the company.
Instead, his total compensation from Meta for 2022 of $27.1 million consists “almost entirely” of costs related to personal security and personal usage of private aircraft, Meta said in its most recent proxy statement.
Meta spent around $14.83 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security at his properties and during personal travel in 2022. It also pays him an annual pre-tax allowance of $10 million to Mr. Zuckerberg to “cover additional costs” related to the personal security of him and his family, including staff, equipment, services, and residential improvements, which the company voted to increase to $14 million in February.
Since March 2022, Meta has also chartered a private aircraft wholly owned by Zuckerberg. The company paid about $523,000 for business travel on the plane in 2022, which included some use by other Meta execs, alongside around $2.28 million for Zuckerberg’s personal use of the aircraft.
How does Zuckerberg stack up to other billionaires?
At time of writing, Zuckerberg was the world’s 10th-richest person, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.
The world’s richest person is currently Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, with an estimated net worth of $229 billion – putting him more than $50 billion ahead of French luxury-goods mogul Bernard Arnault. Apart from Arnault and investor Warren Buffett, all the people wealthier than Zuckerberg on Bloomberg’s index have made their money in the tech industry.
