Mark Zuckerberg Made $3.5 Billion Last Month

November was a good month for Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook‘s stock shot up from $21.08 a share on the first day of trading in November to $28 a share at the end of the day Friday, its highest price since July. Zuckerberg, who owns about 504 million shares of Facebook stock, gained about $3.48 billion as a result.

When Facebook first went public at $38 a share in May, Zuckerberg’s shares were worth $19.1 billion. In the following months, the stock dropped to less than half that IPO price to $17.55 in late August, pushing Zuckerberg’s net worth down to $8.84 billion.

Since then, Facebook’s stock has recovered in fits and starts and so has Zuckerberg’s wealth. November proved to be by far the most robust growth month for the stock to date, thanks to two big factors. First, the company had a strong earnings report in late October, which showed that Facebook was making progress in monetizing mobile. Secondly, the second and largest lockup period for stocks held by employees finally expired in the middle of November, which was something investors had been dreading for months and arguably held down the stock price.

As of Friday, Zuckerberg’s net worth was $14.1 billion and will likely only continue to grow in December.

Facebook’s stock is approaching $30 a share and analysts continue to raise their price targets for the stock on the potential to generate money from mobile ads and other revenue sources like the recently launched Gifts service. Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne Agee, upped his price target on the stock last week from $26 a share to $32 a share. Likewise, Topeka Capital raised their price target from $34 a share to $36 a share.

Perhaps Zuckerberg and Facebook will manage to end this year on an up note after all.

source: mashable.com

Tomorrow Is a Big Day for Facebook’s Stock

The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ are both planning to re-open on Wednesday after having ceased all trading for two days as a result of Hurricane Sandy. For some employees at Facebook, Wednesday probably can’t come soon enough.





The first of three big lockups for Facebook stock expired on Monday, giving employees the option to sell off their shares in the company for the first time since Facebook went public in May. In total, 234 million shares of Facebook stock were freed up as part of the lockup expiration, but because the stock market was closed, employees and shareholders have been unable to trade that stock so far this week.

That all changes on Wednesday.

Facebook employees have spent more than five months watching as the company’s stock plummeted from its IPO price of $38 a share to as low as $17.55 in early September, without having the option to sell off any of their shares. CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged to employees that the declining stock price was “painful” to watch for all.

On the day that the stock hit its all-time low, Facebook announced that it would bump up the first lockup expiration date for employees from Nov. 14 to Oct. 29, which some argued was an attempt by the company to boost employee morale. Since then, Facebook’s stock has staged a bit of resurgence and currently sits at $21.70 a share. While that’s well above the low point, it’s also still well below the IPO price — in fact, as of earlier this month, Facebook employees had lost an average of $2 million each since the IPO.

The big question going into Wednesday is how quickly Facebook employees will be to pull the trigger on cashing out their stock. If they flood the market by selling millions of shares, it could send a signal to investors that even Facebook employees are not confident in the company’s future, which could have a significantly negative impact on the company’s stock price.

A similar situation took place back in August, after the first lockup period expired for 271 millon shares held by Facebook insiders. Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s first investors, quickly sold off nearly all the stock he owned in the company (about 22 million shares), a red flag for investors that hurt the price of the stock.

The average Facebook employee selling this time around certainly doesn’t have 22 million shares to sell, but if employees begin to sell off en masse, it could have a similarly damaging impact on the stock. What’s more, in two weeks, another lockup period will expire for a whopping 777 million shares, which could disrupt the stock’s performance even further.

source: mashable.com

Facebook could shrink like Yahoo —analyst

Can anyone ever imagine social networking giant Facebook "disappearing" eight years from now?

It just might happen, according to a hedge fund manager who noted Facebook‘s sliding stock price in recent weeks.

“In five to eight years, they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared,” tech site Mashable quoted Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson as saying on the CNBC show Squawk on the Street on Monday.

But Jackson qualified his definition of "disappearing" as being a shadow of its present self.

He cited the case of Yahoo, which remains profitable today but is no longer the juggernaut it was in 2000.

“Yahoo is still making money, it’s still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it’s 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it’s disappeared,” he said.

Facebook stock officially went on sale on May 18 at $38 per share. It closed Monday at $26.90, Mashable said.

Mashable quoted Jackson as saying Facebook’s decline may be due to the continued emergence of the mobile web, and Facebook’s struggle to adapt to it.

This was despite Facebook having bought the popular mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion in April.

Still, the company has acknowledged mobile as a potential stumbling block for sustained growth.

“The world is moving faster, it’s getting more competitive, not less. I think those who are dominant in their prior generation are really going to have a hard time moving into this newer generation," he said.

“Facebook can buy a bunch of mobile companies, but they are still a big, fat website and that’s different from a mobile app,” he added.

Problem with mobile

Mashable noted Facebook, during its required initial pre-IPO disclosure of 35 “risk factors” released in February, admitted that as mobile use of Facebook and the web in general continues to expand, its ad-free mobile platform will become more problematic.

It reiterated the challenge in an amended filing in May.

2nd of 3 generations

Mashable said Jackson saw Facebook as a member of the second of three generations of modern Internet companies.

The first generation, highlighted by businesses such as Google and Yahoo, served as portals that organized and aggregated the web’s information.

The second generation, most notably Facebook, capitalized on an emerging social web. The third generation is made up of companies whose sole goal is leveraging and monetizing mobile users.

“When you look over these three generations, no matter how successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how many smart PhDs you have working for you,” Jackson said.

He cited the case of Google, which is struggling to move into social. "And I think Facebook is going to have the same kind of challenges moving into mobile,” he said. — TJD/HS, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com