By Eva Rothenberg | CNN
New York (CNN) — Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth increased by more than $29 billion between your morning coffee and your lunch break.
The Meta founder and CEO — who is already worth more than $140 billion, according to Bloomberg’s billionaire index — has cleaned upfrom Meta’s share price skyrocketing over the past day, after the company announced its first-ever cash dividend program.
Shares of Meta (META) jumped more than 21% on the news of a quarterly dividend of $0.50 per share to be paid out on March 26 to shareholders of record as of February 22.
Zuckerberg owns about 350 million shares of the company, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Unless he sells or buys more shares of company stock, and assuming the quarterly dividend remains at the same level, Zuckerberg will also gain off of the company’s dividend payouts to the tune of approximately $700 million per year.
While dividends excite shareholders because they reward investors for just holding the stock, they’re also widely criticized for artificially inflating the stock price without spending on employees or improvements to the underlying business.
This upswing plasters over potential harm to Meta stock after Zuckerberg, alongside other social media company heads, testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the risks their products pose to young people.
Zuckerberg was pressed about internal Meta documents that suggested the company estimates the lifetime value of a teen user at $270, as well as Meta’s transparency regarding how its monetizes user data.
Zuckerberg apologized to the parents in attendance, who say their children were victims of social media.
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” he said. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industry wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
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