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- Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune surpassed $100 billion after Facebook launched its TikTok competitor in the US.
- That makes the tech titan only the third current centi-billionaire on Earth.
- In June, advertisers including Verizon, Honda, and Ben & Jerry’s boycotted Facebook over the social network’s lack of hate-speech moderation. The boycott briefly sunk both Facebook’s share price and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.
- Zuckerberg drives an affordable car and wears basic clothes, but appears to splurge on real estate, buying houses and then buying the surrounding properties for privacy.
- Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are generous philanthropists, investing billions in childhood education and medical research that they hope will cure all diseases in their children’s lifetimes.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Mark Zuckerberg is richer than he’s ever been.
Facebook’s shares are on a tear after the company launched a new Instagram feature that will compete with TikTok in the US. The move propelled Zuckerberg’s personal net worth over $100 million for the first time.
Before the announcement, Zuckerberg had been having a tough summer. Zuckerberg faced fierce criticism for refusing to moderate Facebook posts in which President Trump called civil rights protesters “thugs” and suggested violence when he wrote “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
As a result, civil rights organizations including NAACP, Color of Change, and Anti-Defamation League asked advertisers to stop paying for advertisements on Facebook. Many agreed, sending both Facebook’s share price and Zuckerberg’s net worth into a freefall.
Keep reading to learn more about how the Facebook cofounder makes and spends his centibillion-dollar fortune.
In May 2012, eight years after its founding, Facebook debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, it was the biggest technology IPO in history.
Source: Business Insider
Each year since the IPO, Zuckerberg has added an average of $9 billion to his net worth.
Source: Fortune
Despite his status as one of the richest tech moguls, the Harvard dropout leads a low-key lifestyle with his wife, Priscilla Chan, and their two young daughters.
Like many other Silicon Valley stalwarts, Zuckerberg favors a uniform. Though casual in appearance, his signature gray T-shirts and hoodies are designed by luxury brands and are reportedly much more expensive than they look, retailing for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.
Source: Business Insider, GQ
Zuckerberg is known for driving relatively inexpensive cars. He's been seen in an Acura TSX, and a Honda Fit, all of which are valued at or under $30,000.
Sources: Business Insider, CNBC
He's also been spotted driving a black Volkswagen Golf GTI, a car that he bought well into making his fortune. It's a car that would cost about $30,000 when new.
Source: Business Insider
But that's not to say he hasn't dropped serious cash on at least one sports car: an Italian Pagani Huayra that sells for about $1.3 million.
Source: Business Insider; Yahoo
There's one thing Zuckerberg doesn't seem to mind splurging on: real estate. In May 2011, he bought a 5,000-square-foot home — which he's since tricked out with a "custom-made artificially intelligent assistant" — in Palo Alto for $7 million.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, CNBC
The next year, Zuckerberg began buying the properties surrounding his home, spending more than $30 million to acquire four homes, with plans to level them and rebuild.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, CNBC
He also owns a townhouse in the Mission District of San Francisco. He bought the 5,500-square-foot home in 2013 and proceeded to make over $1 million in renovations, including adding a greenhouse and remodeling the kitchen.
Source: Curbed San Francisco
In 2014, the billionaire's real-estate portfolio jumped the Pacific when he spent $100 million on two properties on the island of Kauai: the Kahu'aina Plantation, a 357-acre former sugarcane plantation, and Pila'a Beach, a 393-acre property with a white-sand beach.
Source: Business Insider, Forbes
Zuckerberg said he and Chan bought the land because they're "dedicated to preserving its natural beauty."
Source: Business Insider, Forbes
According to Zuckerberg's Facebook page, the property's farm is home to goats and turtles. "Our farm animals are ridiculous," he captioned the photo below.
More recently, he dished out on two lakefront properties on Lake Tahoe, which cost a combined $59 million. One of the houses, called the Brushwood Estate, is 5,233 square feet and on six acres. The property features a guest house and a private dock.
Source: Business Insider, SF Gate
Between his two Lake Tahoe properties, he owns about 600 feet of private shoreline on Lake Tahoe's west shore.
Source: Business Insider, SF Gate
When Zuckerberg buys properties, he tends to buy the other homes surrounding it for privacy reasons, just like he has done in Palo Alto.
Source: Business Insider
Privacy is likely the same reason that he bought the second home — and was reportedly in talks to buy a third — in Lake Tahoe.
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg doesn't appear to travel much for pleasure. But when he does travel, Facebook foots the bill. Zuckerberg's security detail and transportation cost the company nearly $5 million in 2015.
Source: Business Insider
However, he does occasionally get to spend time with his family while traveling. Zuckerberg and Chan met with the pope in the Vatican and reportedly gave the pope a model Facebook drone.
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg used over $1 million in Facebook funds for personal travel in 2018, making it his most expensive year yet. While in Europe, he posted about celebrating his seventh anniversary with Chan at the Parthenon in Athens.
Source: Facebook
In May 2019, he visited Paris to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron.
Sources: Business Insider, Bloomberg
The costs to protect Zuckerberg rose to over $7 million in 2017, after he spent the summer traversing America as part of his personal goal to visit every US state in a year.
Source: Business Insider
On his whirlwind tour around the US, the CEO dined with a family at their home in Ohio, met with former opioid addicts, worked on an assembly line at a Ford factory, met with members of the military, and even fed a calf.
Source: Business Insider
In 2018, Facebook approved a record-high $10 million annual security budget for Zuckerberg for bodyguards, security measures for his houses, and private aircraft.
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg has complete control over Facebook's future, thanks to his majority voting rights. Facebook's stock price rose 2% after the FTC announced approval of the social media giant's $5 billion privacy settlement.
Source: Business Insider
Ultimately, opulence and luxury are just a blip on Zuckerberg's radar. In fact, his main priority is giving his money away, rather than spending it.
Zuckerberg is a member of the Giving Pledge, joining Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and over 100 other billionaires vowing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. He plans to sell 99% of his Facebook shares during his lifetime.
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg said in September 2017 that he planned to sell 35 to 75 million shares over the next 18 months to fund the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, totaling between $6 billion and $12 billion.
Source: Business Insider
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic organization Zuckerberg founded with his wife in 2015 focused on "personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities."
Source: Business Insider
In 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative partnered with housing startup Landed, giving $5 million to help at least 60 teachers in Redwood City and East Palo Alto, California, purchase real estate.
Source: Business Insider
The couple's charitable initiative is invested in tackling both local and global issues. In 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan invested $3 billion into research focused on curing the world's diseases by the end of the century.
Source: Business Insider
In an in-depth interview with the The New Yorker in late 2018, Zuckerberg said people in Silicon Valley react to his pledge to cure all diseases in one of two ways: "A bunch of people have the reaction of 'Oh, that's obviously going to happen on its own — why don't you just spend your time doing something else?' And then a bunch of people have the reaction of 'Oh, that seems almost impossible — why are you setting your sights so high?'"
Sources: The New Yorker, Business Insider
In order to accomplish this lofty goal, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative launched a $3 billion nonprofit called Biohub to start looking into the cure of disease, including research on genomics, infectious diseases, and implantable devices.
Source: Business Insider
The scientists their nonprofit employed have started a study of brain-machine devices, including one called the Wand, which is an implant they say can help limit the symptoms of diseases like Parkinson's and epilepsy.
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg believes that his nonprofit will help speed up research to cure disease, and says that in the future, "We'll basically have been able to manage or cure all of the major things that people suffer from and die from today. Based on the data that we already see, it seems like there's a reasonable shot."
Source: Business Insider
Zuckerberg's leadership hasn't always been popular, however.
Source: Business Insider, Business Insider
Zuckerberg faced outrage from his employees and Facebook users alike after refusing to moderate Trump's posts, where the president called civil rights protesters "thugs" and suggested violence against them by writing "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." One employee of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative even asked Zuckerberg to resign if the billionaire didn't moderate the posts.
Source: Business Insider, Business Insider
Led by civil rights organizations including NAACP, Color of Change, and Anti-Defamation League, Facebook advertisers revolted too, pulling their ad spending from Facebook in a coordinated boycott beginning in July. The growing boycott wiped $9.6 billion off Zuckerberg's net worth between June 23 and June 28.
The Hershey Co., Unilever, Verizon, Honda, Birchbox, Ben & Jerry's, The North Face, REI, and Patagonia have all signed on, vowing to withhold their ad dollars from the social networking site.
"We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and continuously work with outside experts to review and update our policies," Facebook said in a statement regarding the boycott. "We've opened ourselves up to a civil rights audit, and we have banned 250 white supremacist organizations from Facebook and Instagram."
"The investments we have made in AI mean that we find nearly 90% of Hate Speech we action before users report it to us, while a recent EU report found Facebook assessed more hate speech reports in 24 hours than Twitter and YouTube," the statement continued. "We know we have more work to do, and we'll continue to work with civil rights groups, GARM, and other experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to continue this fight."
Source: Business Insider, Bloomberg Billionaires Index
Facebook's tide started to turn on August 6, when the launch of a new Instagram feature design to compete with TikTok sent both the company's share price and Zuckerberg's net worth to new heights. The move caused Zuckerberg's net worth to exceed $100 million for the first time, and makes him only the third centibillionaire currently on Earth.
Source: Bloomberg
