No billionaire’s net worth has increased more than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s so far this year.
Since the start of 2024, Zuckerberg’s wealth increased $55.6 billion, bringing it to a total of $184 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
Until earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had topped the list of year-to-date gains. The chipmaker's stock is on an historic tear, shooting up 120% over the last year and 2,219% over the last five. However, it dropped 13% this week, denting Huang’s total net worth.
Huang owns a roughly 3.5% stake in Nvidia after selling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock over the last several months.
Much of Zuckerberg’s net worth is also tied up in stock of the company he founded. He is the largest individual shareholder of Meta, owning about 345.5 million shares, according to Meta’s proxy statement filed in April. About 344 million of Zuckerberg's shares are Class B shares, a special type of Meta stock that grants holders 10 votes per share. He owns 99.7% of this class of share.
Meta’s stock is also soaring this year, up 49%. As of Friday, the price was $514. But Zuckerberg’s net worth is often subject to wild fluctuations because it is so closely linked to Meta’s share price. In February of this year, his net worth rose $28 billion in a single day when Meta's stock jumped 20% after a particularly great earnings call.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
All that has made Zuckerberg the third-richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg’s list. Only Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos have a higher net worth than Zuckerberg. Musk and Bezos are worth $251 billion and $201 billion, respectively. Both famed tech executives saw their own personal fortunes balloon this year as well. Bezos, despite stepping down from the CEO role at Amazon in 2021, remains the largest individual shareholder of Amazon.
Musk, who owns several companies, derives much of his net worth from his Tesla stock. His compensation at Tesla has been the subject of much discussion. In 2018, the board signed and Musk agreed to a uniquely structured all-or-nothing package in which he would receive huge stock awards if he reached certain performance targets, but nothing at all if he didn’t, no matter how close he got.
But his $56 billion pay package has been the subject of a shareholder lawsuit in Delaware. Musk is now engaged in a last-ditch effort to have the package reinstated after a judge voided it in January.
