How good was it to be Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday?
Well, how does making $6.2 billion just by waking up sound? That’s how much the Facebook CEO’s company stock earned him by the time trading on the U.S. stock markets closed Thursday.
Facebook shares climbed 11 percent Thursday, to close at $166.69, after the company reported record fourth-quarter results late Wednesday that included earnings of $2.38 a share on revenue of $16.91 billion, and a 9 percent gain in monthly active users to 2.32 billion.
With that gain in stock price, Zuckerberg’s personal fortune climbed to $65.6 billion. That was good enough to make him the fifth-most richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Zuckerberg’s gains Thursday vaulted him past Spain’s Amancio Ortega and Mexico’s Carlos Slim on the world’s richest persons list.
However, Zuckerberg still has a way to go to get to the top spot among the billionaires of the world. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — whose stock in his company made him $3.8 billion on Thursday — lifted his personal fortune to $142.1 billion, or more than twice the relative pittance that Zuckerberg has in his proverbial bank account.
