By Agencies
The Facebook co-founder and CEO sold 2.9 million shares this year worth more than $526 million after a long break in selling shares since April.
Zuckerberg who still owns over 375 million Facebook shares with a current value of over $68 billion, makes him the fifth-richest person in the world, according to Forbes, right behind Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault and Warren Buffett.
Zuckerberg, 35, regularly sells parts of his Facebook fortune to fund the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic organization he runs with his wife, Priscilla Chan.
CZI funds programs in science and education as well as social issues focused on criminal justice reform, housing affordability and immigration reform.
Zuckerberg’s share sales are part of a 10b5-1 plan, a rule established by the Securities and Exchange Commission that allows public company insiders to sell a predetermined amount of stock at set periods of time, CNBC reported, citing the filings.
Zuckerberg also retains voting control over the company’s big decisions even after selling a significant portion of his stake. Facebook shares were trading down by less than 1% on Thursday at $182.11.
The amount of shares sold by Zuckerberg is still far from last year’s spree, when the Facebook CEO sold nearly 28.9 million shares for more than $5.3 billion.
In late 2017, Zuckerberg said he planned to sell up to 75 million shares, worth more than $12 billion at the time, by March of this year.
