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Facebook backer Jim Breyer sells $81.1M in stock

The venture capitalist, an early big backer of the company, shed some of his holdings last week.

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
 
Facebook backer Jim Breyer
Jim Breyer, the venture capitalist whose firm Accel Partners made an early bet on Facebook, last week sold shares of Facebook worth more than $81.1 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

More specifically, Breyer, who sits on Facebook's board, sold 3,563,387 shares at prices ranging from $22.48 to $23.29 per share. The sales occurred last Thursday.

While those prices are a far cry from the $38 a share that Facebook went public at in May, Breyer still hit a high point of late. The stock had just rallied following Facebook's solid earnings report and an upbeat conference call with Wall Street analysts in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked up the money-making opportunity from mobile. A week earlier, the stock was trading around $19.

Breyer, according to the filing, still holds more than 7.2 million shares, which, at Facebook's current price of $21.94, is worth more than $157.6 million.

Breyer courted Zuckerberg in Facebook's early days and eventually got him to agree to take a $12.7 million investment that valued the company at $93 million. What a bet that turned out to be -- for him and his firm. Accel sold $2.1 billion worth of shares into the IPO.

Correction, 5:45 p.m. PDT: This story incorrectly stated the amount of the sale. Breyer sold shares of Facebook worth more than $81.1 million.