Marc Zuckerberg: Is there a single family office?

Where does the fortune of Marc Zuckerberg come from?

Marc Zuckerberg is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding and leading the successful social media network Facebook. Marc Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook from his dormitory room in 2004 together with his roommates. Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest billionaire in 2007 at age 23 is ranked today as the fifth richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of 75 billion us dollars.

How did Zuckerberg’s company Facebook develop?

Founded out of Zuckerberg’s student apartment, Facebook was first introduced as a network between Harvard’s students but developed quickly beyond other colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. During the first year the company received numerous acquisition offers, but rejected all of them. After a few months the famous investor Peter Thiel got on board and the company was moved to Silicon Valley. After first being restricted to students, Facebook opened its services to everyone who was at least 13 years old and had a valid email address. Facebook then experienced a massive growth during the following years. In 2012 the company bought the widely known photo-sharing-start-up Instagram for 1 billion us dollars, that today has more than 1 billion daily users. Expanding its market power, Facebook acquired the famous messaging service WhatsApp in 2019 for almost 20 billion us dollars. So today Facebook is clearly the most important and most powerful social media company with revenues of 56 billion us dollars in 2018.

Is there a Marc Zuckerberg family office?

Marc Zuckerberg invests his fortune through various instruments and does not explicitly own a single family office, but in the past some investments were made, alongside with other famous tech-entrepreneurs such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), through the Silicon Valley based multi family office “Iconiq Capital”. Together with his wife Priscilla, Zuckerberg created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, named after his daughter, to run philanthropic activities.

How does the Zuckerberg family office invest?

As said before, Zuckerberg manages some of his investments through the multi family office “Iconiq Capital”. The firm is specialized in venture capital funding and participated, for example, in the pre-IPO rounds of Alibaba and Flipkart. Zuckerberg and his wife pledged to give away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes for charitable projects. To do so they are using the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy. For example, they invested in the start-up “Andela”, that is focused on training software developers in Africa.

This article is part of our detailed report “The single family offices of the richest US families“.

Picture source: Kon Karampelas

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