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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Now Richer Than Steve Jobs
- BenSchaechter 16y agoMaybe. But Steve Jobs is currently a lot more liquid than Zuckerberg.
- aliston 16y ago"I'm not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I'm talking about liquid"
- gallerytungsten 16y agoExactly.
- robryan 16y agoMaybe, but Job's still doesn't get paid a wage if I recall correctly meaning he wouldn't be overly liquid unless he has cashed in a fair amount over time.
- prawn 16y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't shares in a publicly-traded company (e.g., Apple) be considered fairly liquid?
- robryan 16y agoNo expert but wouldn't it depend on the scale of what he wanted to take out. Say for example Job's attempting to take a billion dollars off the table would have to effect the share price.
- clark-kent 16y agoJobs will still be liquid with or without Apple Shares. Remember he sold Pixar for $7.4 billion. And he still owns 7% of Disney.
- Encosia 16y agoAlso, Don't forget the dividends he's been accumulating from his Disney stock. That alone has been tens of millions of dollars each year.
- Aetius 16y agoAnd this matters because?? I've heard Larry Ellison is the most illiquid billionaire, as he finances everything with loans against his massive equity in Oracle. He's still in the top 5 richest people. Zuckerberg is no different.
- SamReidHughes 16y agoLarry Ellison is also more liquid than Zuckerberg.
- ojbyrne 16y agoOracle has 25 years of cash flow to finance against. I suspect he gets good terms.
- quizbiz 16y agoHow exactly does one finance everything with loans against equity? What does that mean? How does he pay back the loans? With shares?
- borism 16y agowow, borrowing against stock, how risky is that (for both him and his shareholders)? apparently he has been sued about it http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-01-31/news/17279373_1_oracle-stock-larry-ellison-shareholder-lawsuit http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-01-31/news/17279373_1_oracle...
- aresant 16y agoDespite being a long time Apple investor I was caught completely off gaurd that Jobs only owns 5,500,000 shares out of well over 900,000,000 outstanding. Makes the perks like the private jet look like peanuts vs. value he's brought to the table.
- terryjsmith 16y agoZuckerberg obviously still retains a large portion of his founding shares (whatever he hasn't sold for FU money and hasn't been diluted). I imagine Steve Jobs lost and/or sold a good majority of his Apple stock after he was ousted and now only has what has been awarded to him since his return.
- philwelch 16y agoJobs actually sold himself down to 1 share of Apple soon after NeXT was acquired, which triggered the ouster of Gil Amelio and the appointment of Jobs as interim CEO. The stock that he sold was all given to him by Apple as part of the Next acquisition--he had no stock (aside from perhaps one share, again for sentimental reasons) between when he left Apple and when Next was acquired, and after coming back he only got stock in later years when the board gave him stock and options.
- eugenejen 16y agoIIRC Steve Jobs sold all his Apple shares when he was ousted by John Sculley. All Steve Jobs has right now are options granted during last 14 years plus what he received from acquisition of Next Inc.
- dcurtis 16y agoThe Apple board has consistently granted him options, but he never exercises them (except for a couple grants in 1998-1999 that brought his company ownership to SEC-required levels for the CEO position). He has given up billions of dollars by simply letting his options expire. Apple's SEC filings are generally interesting, if you're ever incredibly bored.
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- rblion 16y agoSteve Jobs is still cooler and has more respect.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoOn a semi-related note, I think it's really interesting that something like 80% of Jobs' net worth is from Pixar (now Disney), not Apple. And yet a lot of people don't even know he was involved in Pixar at all.
- yardie 16y agoI watched the Pixar story movie and learned a lot about Jobs, Lasseter and Pixar. Lasseter is definitely the visionary behind Pixar, financially so is Jobs. He bought them from Lucas in '86. Toy Story wasn't released until '95. That means for 9 years, not only was he not making money, he had to write personal checks to pump in money every year just to keep the company afloat. The man deserves every bit of credit he gets for Pixar.
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoThe Pixar company originally sold hardware and then software, before it became all about animation. Even on the animation side it was doing adverts to bring in money. So it wasn't a charity project with the aim of creating great art, it was just an unsuccessful technology business until the Disney deal.
- patrickaljord 16y agoDell is richer than Steve Jobs too btw.
- josefresco 16y agoMichael Dell? Really? Funny considering Dell was basically funded by Intel for years. URL with data would be nice.
- code_duck 16y agoI bet Steve wishes he hadn't ditched all that stock in the 80s. Not like it really matters; obviously he has total say over the company and is surely more than comfortable enough financially. And, we'll see what happens in 10 years, huh? Facebook might be worth 20 times as much, or 1/20th. Apple is pretty stable at this point and not likely to go anywhere but steadily up, in my opinion. ------------------------ Ha! Please, wise HN users, explain to me why you downvoted this. I'm interested in hearing the rationale.
- wallflower 16y ago“[Sandy and Len Bosack] urgently sold their shares in Cisco at a time when the valuation of the company was a mere $1B.” – Don Valentine (the lead VC) From Triumph of the Geeks, the inventors of the very first router owned about 20% of the company http://venturehacks.com/articles/cisco-founders http://venturehacks.com/articles/cisco-founders
- siglesias 16y agoThey've got 95% of the PC market to take. You think they'll just give that up?
- forensic 16y agoWhen you look at how Jobs quit Apple and sold his shares, the fact that he's even a billionaire is pretty impressive. He made all the money from NeXTSTEP and Pixar.
- philwelch 16y agoHe bought Pixar, and founded Next, from the money he made at Apple. Next was actually acquired on a down valuation--according to Wikipedia, Canon's investment gave them a $600 million valuation in 1989, whereas they were acquired by Apple for $429 million in 1996.
- lukeqsee 16y agoOn paper. Facebook owns a lot of eyeballs. Apple owns a lot of people. (It's time versus cult following.) People > eyeballs
- duck 16y agoBut did Jobs ever say he was going to F&#@ his users in their ears?
- benologist 16y agoJobs spent the last few months doing it because he felt like it. That's a bit bigger than saying it.
- jordanbrown 16y agoHard to believe he is only 26.
- elblanco 16y agoJobs' money is closer to real money than some arbitrary (and frankly unbelievable in the realm of fantasy) valuation metric. Steve could (in theory) cash out tomorrow and those 5.5million shares would be worth more or less their face value. Zuckerberg has to actually sell his company. And to be honest, Facebook would be a really lousy investment at the current valuation (whatever that number happens to be depending on the phase of the moon $14-$100 billion). Even at the conservative end of this ridiculous metric, say $25 billion, it would take about 30 years at current revenue to equal that let alone make any money on it -- that's a shitty investment as bad as buying a house. They'd have to double their revenue stream every single year to make it worth buying at that price within some reasonable payoff-time like 5 years (a saner metric that most people use when valuing corporate assets, "what's the 5 year revenue expectations of this company?). Sure they're on an exponential growth path right now, how much longer do exponential growth paths last? History shows, "not long". Their bigger problem is that they pretty much have most of the Internet connected human species with broadband and disposable income already signed up. I don't think any of the analysts understand this. You'd have to drag huge chunks of the population of the planet out of poverty and into middleclassdom to make any meaningful movement upwards in those numbers. FB might be able to squeeze 750 million users this generation out of the planet. But getting more than that will involve bringing world peace to the Earth and feeding and educating all of humanity. Looking at hard numbers, in markets where FB has about %50 market penetration, their growth rate is ~4% per month. Actually, the ~4% metric works even down to 30% penetration. And you see <10% growth for places with around a 15% penetration. The only places with high growth are current low penetration markets like India and Brazil, with ~14% growth, but <4% penetration. One could reasonably expect that as penetration increases, growth will decrease (yeah yeah every point growth in India is some huge number, but India is not some huge middle-class affluent market waiting for penetration, You're simply not going to sign on 30% of India's population only 7% have any Internet access at all, exactly the same as last year). Doubling revenue year over year for 5 years is fantasy-land in most cases, not going to happen if you've saturated the market. And unless we make interstellar contact soon, or can expand Facebook into the Dolphin and Chimp populations, it's not going to grow much more. At some point, FB's new signons are going to start tracking global birthrates (and active users will start to decline as the baby boomers start to pass on). The human population growth curves of the planet look bleak for FB. Don't get me wrong, FB is a valuable company, maybe $5-7 billion, maybe 10 on the very high end. Those are still very impressive numbers. But these valuation numbers that float around are some of the most fantastic multiples of revenue I've seen in ages. Either the models the analysts are using are wrong, or they're simply pulling random numbers out of their asses. I'm guessing the later since I've seen some pretty wild ranges. So my real question is, Zuckerberg is richer than Jobs, based on what? How many wishes and unicorns Zuck can buy with his fantasy valuation money? Valuation means nothing until it's turned into real money.
- Poiesis 16y agoThere's no accounting for taste.
- sankara 16y agoAll the real money vs hyped money thing apart, I read somewhere that a 2003 decision by Steve Jobs to swap his options for a low return but safer alternative has costed him a lot. As per the article his worth would have been at least $13 billion now. Couldn't locate the original article; found the following with a google search. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-steve-jobs-blunders-on-options-swap-2010-05-18 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-steve-jobs-blunders-... Anyone care to confirm or deny this?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sbaqai 16y agoCan someone explain to me Facebook's value? And please understand, I don't ask that to be antagonistic - from what I understand and have read, I've yet to take a side on whether facebook is the new king in SV or if its a sign of another bubble. If someone can calmly explain what value they provide, their prospects for future growth, and future competitive advantage, I'd seriously be grateful. Here is what I understand: Facebook earned $650M in revenue in 2009. Most of that came from brand and performance-based advertising. $50M from Microsoft ads alone. $10M on virtual goods. [1] Their biggest revenue share comes from advertising. Now, again, from what I understand, their ad targeting isn't as focused as, say, Google. I'm going to make an assumption, but it makes sense to me that Google users demonstrate more purchasing intent, which is why they can charge high CPC. I've never found a Facebook ad relevant to my purpose for being on the site, but regardless, I can understand the value for any company to spend money on brand awareness, getting views on a high traffic site with quantifiable demographics. Performance advertising is interesting in facebook's case. When I type in 'Digital Camera' in google, I'm voluntarily giving out a query in exchange for information. Ads for digital cameras, photography books, etc would in fact be quite welcome for a decent percentage of people. But the search-engine user controls that exchange of service. Its akin to using a hammer. Google is the tool. The functionality is in your hands. Facebook's model is more of an extraction process. Someone has opened a coffee shop with free coffee - but its only free if you hang around the place. Over time, they are trying to develop a model of you based on information that is overheard and asked of you. This is where I'm unsure if its sustainable. I'd also say a great majority of facebook users don't realize how the site has changed since its inception. A large majority of my non-technical friends have no idea how information is being analyzed. I'm not sure how robust facebook's brand is if some terrible scandal/event breaks out and people become really sensitive to what they share with the site. This "social contract" between users, facebook, and advertisers is something I don't think the majority of users understand. They just see it as a site with their friends. And its to facebook's benefit for users not to fully understand. The last point I want to make is about Social Media. I understand how its shifted interaction and all that. But my concern is with its ties to the capitalistic sense of value. Technological progress does not always = making a ton of money. There are a lot of major technologies that changed the world . There were 2000 car companies at one point, and now only 3 american companies remain. Cars changed everything, city planning, etc, but investors, in aggregate, got fucked. The airline business is a similar story. There was also the tech bubble. EDIT: I also want to add that since it is a private company, it is in almost everyone's favor to drive up its valuation. Founders, investors, and employees with stock, etc all benefit. When a company is public, there is an incentive to introduce negative information (hence the utility of short sellers). Now, I'd love to hear an explanation on why its such an 800lb gorilla in the valley. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-wont-be-a-multi-billion-dollar-company-for-many-years-2010-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-wont-be-a-multi-bill...
- pyre 16y agoWell, duh! Steve Jobs only makes $1/year working for Apple! ;-)
- rlmw 16y agoWhats more interesting for me, is the way that a lot of news stories are specific examples of interesting things ripped out of the odd bit of research. For example, once the Forbes 400 list has been compiled you could pretty much auto-generate articles like this one. They've just dragged in a load of facts about the two people, combined with facts about the people from their Rich List. There's pretty much no non-trivial analysis here.