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Zuckerberg cashes in $1.1 billion selling Facebook stock

The CEO and founder completed selling a portion of his stock -- at a price that few other sellers have been able to get since.

Paul Sloan Former Editor
Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
Paul Sloan

Turns out, Mark Zuckerberg -- like all the insiders who sold shares into the IPO -- got a good deal.

Facebook's CEO has completed a transaction of the 30.2 million shares that he was slotted to sell, according a document filed with the SEC.

He sold them at $37.58 a share, netting him more than $1.1 billion. His price was just below the offering price of $38 because the underwriters take a cut. Zuckerberg had planned to sell the stock mainly as a way to pay taxes, according to the company's S-1 IPO filing.

Even so, his quick profit was far better than many others' betting on his company's IPO have done. While the stock is up slightly so far today -- just below $32 a share -- it's almost 16 percent below the offering price and far from the $45 a share it briefly touched during its messy debut on Friday.

The newlywed, by far the biggest shareholder, still owns 503.6 million shares, so he's still sporting a paper worth of more than $16.1 billion.