In the final two months of 2023, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms Inc.’s CEO, resumed selling company shares after a two-year hiatus, during which the stock price hit a seven-year low. According to a Tuesday regulatory filing, Zuckerberg sold nearly 1.28 million shares for approximately $428 million (R7.98 billion), with each sale averaging $10.4 million. The largest sale occurred on 28 December, amounting to $17.1 million. Prior to this period, Zuckerberg had not sold Meta shares since November 2021.
Read: Tesla is no longer the world’s largest EV manufacturer
The company’s stock price rebounded by 194% in the past year from a seven-year low at the end of 2022, outperforming all major tech giants except Nvidia Corp. Meta shares are currently close to their September 2021 record high. At 39 years old, Zuckerberg owns around 13% of Meta, with a net worth of approximately $125 billion, ranking him as the seventh-richest person globally according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Meta has not responded to requests for comments.
In a similar move, Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce Inc., sold shares almost every day in the second half of 2023. Benioff unloaded over $475 million worth of shares, selling around 15,000 shares (approximately $3 million) daily during that period.
