Mark Zuckerberg Sold Facebook Stock Nearly Every Weekday Last Year For Almost 11 Months

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a selling spree in 2021.

The seventh-richest person in the world—worth $117 billion as of Wednesday, according to Forbes—sold shares of the company formerly known as Facebook on nearly every business day last year for a total of nearly $4.6 billion before taxes, according to Forbes’ calculations of  Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The only month he didn’t sell any shares was December. About 89% of the proceeds, or nearly $4.1 billion, went to his philanthropic and advocacy organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The remaining sum—about $495 million, or $312 million after taxes, Forbes estimates—were sales of shares owned by his trusts. Zuckerberg has reduced his stake in Meta from 28% in 2012 when the company went public to 14.6% today.

The frequency last year with which Zuckerberg sold shares of Facebook, as it was known until late October 2021, isn’t all that unusual. Since 2012, Zuckerberg has sold $17.4 billion worth of shares (before taxes). The vast majority of those sales—nearly $13.2 billion—were made by CZI, as Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, move toward their 2015 promise to give away 99% of his Facebook shares during his lifetime. The $4.6 billion in 2021 sales of Facebook is the second-largest annual sum he’s parted with; he and CZI sold a combined $5.3 billion worth of stock in 2018. In 2020, Zuckerberg and CZI sold less than $600 million worth of stock.

Plenty of other billionaires took advantage of the runup in stock prices to sell billions of dollars worth of holdings last year. Jeff Bezos sold more than $8.8 billion worth of Amazon stock in 2021, including $2 billion worth of shares in November. Google GOOG cofounder Sergey Brin sold tens of millions of dollars worth of Alphabet stock in May for the first time since 2017. And, perhaps most prominently, Elon Musk began exercising options and selling billions of dollars of Tesla TSLA stock in November, claiming he will pay $11 billion in taxes for the year as a result. Back in April, Forbes calculated the 20 biggest billionaire sellers of stock.

With Zuckerberg’s billions, CZI, a limited liability corporation (LLC) based in Redwood City, California, funds scientific research, education initiatives and criminal justice reform efforts. The organization says it has doled out $2.9 billion in grants and invested $150 million into for-profit ventures since 2015. In 2016, CZI made a bold bet: that it would spend $3 billion over a decade in an effort to cure all diseases. More recently, CZI’s scientific efforts aided California’s response to the pandemic; its software was used by state officials to track and sequence the virus.

For now, Zuckerberg has taken a break from the steady transactions. He didn’t unload any shares in December, nor has he started selling again so far in January. In CZI’s annual letter, published December, Zuckerberg and Chan said the organization will focus on “developing technologies to advance our biological understanding of the human body” over the next decade. This includes the creation of an institute for advanced biomedical imaging and a hub at Harvard University working on using AI and machine learning in biology and medicine.