When social media website Facebook began to take off and post stratospheric growth, it was widely assumed that when it can time for its inevitable IPO, it was going to make company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg extremely wealthy. Now that Facebook has filed for its IPO, the conjecture is over. We have details about how big the payoff could be, not only for Zuckerberg, but for his closest lieutenants and biggest investors.
In 2011, Zuckerberg’s compensation was nothing to sneeze at. As CEO of Facebook, he collected a $500,000 base salary, collected a $220,500 bonus, and received an additional $783,529 (most of which related to use of a personal jet for the CEO, his family, and friends). COO Sheryl Sandberg collected $381,966 in salary and bonus, plus $30.5 million in stock awards, making her the company’s best-paid senior executive in 2011.
With her current holdings and stock options, Sandberg could be worth in the $2 billion range after the IPO, putting the 42-year-old former Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) vice president in league with Oprah as one of the world’s wealthiest women. CFO David Ebersman’s salary was in the same range as Sandberg’s, and he received a healthy $18.3 million in stock awards.
Facebook’s CEO will be taking a symbolic $1 annual salary in 2013—a gesture probably intended to invoke the spirit of Apple‘s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Steve Jobs rather than the image of former Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who made the $1 gesture back in December. Of course Zuckerberg’s real payoff will be his 28.4% stake in the company, which could be worth as much as $28.4 billion should Facebook’s valuation reach $100 billion. According to Bloomberg, that is likely to land Zuckerberg in the top 10 of the Forbes list of wealthiest people in the world. Zuckerberg will hold 42.2 million Class A shares, with options on 120 million Class B shares.
Outside of Zuckerberg, who ends up getting what out of the Facebook IPO? Here’s our list of who will own the biggest chunks of the company, based on VentureBeat’s detailed analysis of the filing and an analysis by All Things D:
- Zuckerberg will personally own 28% of Facebook.
- Accel Partners (an early, 2006 Facebook investor) owns 190 million Class B shares, with Jim Breyer —who led that firm’s Facebook investment— personally receiving an additional 11.7 million Class B shares. This block will own 11.4%.
- Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns 7.6%.
- Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (which invested $200 million in 2009 and added $500 million as part of the 2011 round with Goldman Sachs) will have 36.7 million Class A shares and 94.6 million Class B shares for 5.4% of the company.
- Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, was an angel investor whose $500,000 investment in Facebook in 2004 translates into a 44.7 million Class B shares —a 2.5% ownership stake.
While other Facebook executives will own shares (for example, Sandberg will have 1.9 million Class B shares and Ebersman will have 2.2 million Class B shares), they don’t show up on the radar when it comes to significant ownership stakes. Other investors who have shares but don’t factor into the bigger ownership picture include Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings.
As of this writing, Brad Moon did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
