NEW YORK — Mark Zuckerberg remains one of the 30 richest people on Earth after shares of Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking company, hovered near the initial public offering price in its trading debut.
The company’s shares rose 0.6 percent to $38.23 as of 4 p.m. in New York after earlier trading at the IPO price of $38, which valued the company at $104.2 billion.
Zuckerberg’s net worth rose $100 million to $19.4 billion, ranking him 26th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, ahead of Google Inc.’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
“All the big investors and hedge funds came in for a quick flip,” said Mohannad Aama, managing director at Beam Capital Management, in a telephone interview from his New York office. “There was definitely a lot of pressure at the open.”
Facebook raised $16 billion in an initial public offering, selling 421.2 million shares for $38 each on May 17. It was the biggest technology IPO in history. The company began the day valued at 107 times trailing 12-month earnings.
Facebook’s chief executive officer sold 30.2 million shares of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company for $1.15 billion at the offering. Most of the proceeds will be used to pay taxes associated with exercising 60 million stock options. He now owns 503.6 million shares.
Dustin Moskovitz, 27, who co-founded Facebook with Zuckerberg from their dorm room at Harvard University, owns 133.7 million shares of the company’s Class B stock worth $5.1 billion. He will sell 7.5 million shares if the underwriters exercise their option to buy additional stock.
Moskovitz, the company’s first chief technology officer, left the social network with Facebook colleague Justin Rosenstein in 2008. The duo founded Asana Inc., a task management software company. The company received $9 million in funding from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital in 2009, both of Menlo Park.
Eduardo Saverin, 30, has a $2 billion stake. According to a regulatory filing dated May 17, he owns 53.1 million shares of the company.
The Brazil-born Facebook co-founder renounced his U.S. citizenship last year and is now a permanent resident of Singapore.
“I am obligated to and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to the United States government,” he said in a statement.
Co-founder Christopher Hughes, 28, fell short of becoming a billionaire. He owns about 22 million shares of Facebook, according to a person familiar with his holdings who asked not to be named because the matter is private. His stake is worth $840 million.
Hughes, who bought the Washington, D.C.-based magazine the New Republic in March 2012 for less than $5 million, has more than $100 million in cash and real estate after selling some of his Facebook hoard, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Peter Thiel provided Facebook’s first outside investment: $500,000 in 2004. The Founders Fund Management partner sold 16.8 million shares during the offering and owns almost 28 million shares of Facebook following the deal, according to regulatory filings. His shares are valued at $1.1 billion.
Thiel was brought to Facebook by technology entrepreneur Sean Parker, who persuaded Zuckerberg to move to California to focus on the company full time in 2004. The 32-year-old Parker owns 66 million Facebook shares worth $2.5 billion. He will sell 10 million shares if the underwriters exercise their option to purchase additional shares.
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, 42, who was lured from Google in 2008, owns 27 million shares, including 25 million restricted stock units that have vested. They are valued at $1 billion.
Sandberg owns more than 14 million unvested units that aren’t counted in her net worth calculation. She also owns small stakes in Starbucks Corp. and Walt Disney Co.; she is a director at both companies.
Facebook’s offering further elevated Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga Inc., the world’s largest social gaming company, in the billionaire ranks. Pincus, 46, owns 13 percent of Zynga, whose popular online games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville generated more than 10 percent of Facebook’s sales in 2011. Zynga shares are down more than 50 percent since March.
Pincus owns 4.3 million shares of Facebook valued at $165 million. He sold 1 million Facebook shares during the offering, earning him $38 million.
Alisher Usmanov, Russia’s richest man, has an estimated 80 percent interest in the 85.6 million Facebook shares held by certain DST Global funds. The DST Global entities are controlled by billionaire Yuri Milner, and sold 45.7 million shares in the offering. The funds may sell more in the coming months, according to regulatory filings.
Milner owns about 12.5 percent of DST Global’s Facebook shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. His stake is worth $409 million. The DST Global funds own stakes in Zynga, Groupon Inc. and Twitter Inc.
Usmanov - whose most valuable asset is his 45 percent stake in Metalloinvest, Russia’s largest iron ore producer - has never met Zuckerberg.
