Security papers show that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., the company that owns Facebook, sold about $23 million worth of stock last week to profit from the stock’s recent record highs.
Two different filings say that Zuckerberg sold 35,921 shares for $21.7 million and 2,311 shares for $1.4 million.
A form filed for the company’s third quarter says that the sales were in line with a Rule 10b5-1 trade plan that Zuckerberg put in place on August 9. With that plan, the executive could sell up to 518,000 Class A Meta shares and 1.7 million Class B shares that were owned by companies that he set up to hold his shares.
The plan was worth $1.3 billion at the time. Since the beginning of the year, Meta’s stock META -0.46% has gone up 67%, bringing its market value to $1.5 trillion. It has now joined the club of megacaps like Nvidia Corp. NVDA -1.55%, Apple Inc. AAPL -0.92%, and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.42%. On Dec. 11, the price hit a new high of $632.68.
Rule 10b5-1 plans are set up to carry out transactions immediately when certain conditions are met, such as price, volume, and timing. As part of their job, people who work for the company can use them to cash out their shares without looking like they are taking advantage of private information.
He had already sold $153 million worth of shares by the beginning of December. Fortune magazine did an analysis and found that he has sold a high amount of Meta’s stock this year: more than $2 billion.
Investors in Meta’s stock got a big surprise at the beginning of the year when the company announced its first dividend. The news came with the company’s fourth-quarter numbers in February.
In 2023, Zuckerberg sold about $400 million worth of stock. This ended a two-year period during which the stock dropped sharply as the company tried to change direction toward the metaverse, a virtual world that people could reach through virtual reality devices but never really came to life.
The company cleaned up a lot in 2023 before turning its attention back to building the tech infrastructure that users and businesses would need in 2024 to use artificial intelligence. The company said in its most recent earnings report for the third quarter that it planned to spend between $38 billion and $40 billion on capital projects this year. The company had expected $37 billion to $40 billion before.
Zuckerberg has most of Meta’s voting power because he owns super-voting Class B shares, which have 10 votes each. Class A shares that trade on Nasdaq, on the other hand, only have one vote each.
Files show that as of October 14, Zuckerberg and his companies, such as CZI Holdings LLC and Chan Zuckerberg Holdings LLC, owned 518,424 Class A shares and 343.9 million Class B shares.
Meta’s price went up 0.5% in the morning on Tuesday. This year, the S&P 500 SPX -0.34% has gone up about 24%.
