Open wide – Dr Zuckerberg swallows a Facebook fortune
It was business as usual on Saturday for Edward Zuckerberg, a small-town dentist known as ‘‘Painless Dr Zee’’, even though he had just become a multimillionaire as a Facebook shareholder.
Zuckerberg, 57, had a line of patients booked into his tiny practice in Dobbs Ferry, New York. According to staff, he was determined to fit them in between 8am and 2pm before celebrating his newfound wealth with a cup of coffee and a rock music videogame.
Many of his patients do not realise that he is the father of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, or that when the company was floated on the stock exchange, Zuckerberg Sr’s shareholding was valued at US$76 million (NZ$100M).
He had not even wanted the shares. His son made him register them in return for a loan of a few thousand dollars that helped him create Facebook as a Harvard University student in 2004.
The dentist is not the only Zuckerberg who is suddenly very rich. His eldest daughter, Randi Zuckerberg, who worked on Facebook’s public relations before setting up her own PR company, tweeted ‘‘Yay!’’ as her shares reached US$100M.
Mark’s two other sisters, Donna and Arielle, are also expected to share in his US$20 billion bounty.
Mark Zuckerberg has credited his father with giving him the ‘‘tech bug’’ when he was child, filling their suburban home with computers and gadgets.
Before he left for boarding school, Mark used an old Atari 800 to build his first version of Facebook, a system of instant messaging between computers around the house and the surgery that the family called ‘‘Zucknet’’.
Zuckerberg said his son had always been toughminded.
‘‘If you were going to say ‘no’ to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons. We envisioned him becoming a trial lawyer with a near 100 per cent success rate.’’
Zuckerberg said he may cut back his hours to take more diving trips with his wife, Karen, a psychiatrist. But last week he told staff, some of whom have been with him for decades, that he had no plans to stop working or ‘‘go fancy’’.
Neither does his son. On Thursday, a few days after he turned 28, Mark joined Facebook staff in their Silicon Valley headquarters in an allnight ‘‘hackathon’’ where, sprawled under a big tent, they worked on creating code for Facebook’s Timeline feature.
‘‘No-one is slowing down here, even if we are now all rich, rich, rich,’’ one programmer said.
The flotation has created 1000 millionaires, although, to avoid tax, many will not sell their shares immediately. Facebook’s founders, meanwhile, are reacting in sharply different ways.
Sean Parker, the creator of the music piracy site Napster, who advised Mark to ‘‘think big’’ with Facebook, will channel his NZ$1.7B shareholding into new Silicon Valley start-ups.
Chris Hughes, son of a paper salesman who shared a dormitory at Harvard with Mark and became Facebook’s first publicity chief, is now worth more than NZ$2B. He has invested his windfall in ‘‘old media’’, buying The New Republic magazine.
The Winklevoss twins, who claimed Mark stole the Facebook idea from them, won 1.25 million shares in a court settlement. Their holding is now worth more than NZ$400M.
Bono, lead singer of U2, responded angrily to reports that he was now the world’s richest rocker after his 1.5 per cent stake in Facebook, bought through a private equity company for £56m (NZ$117M), was valued at £1b.
Mark has pledged to give away hundreds of millions of dollars to improve state schools and his co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, whose shares were worth NZ$6.3B on Saturday, may invest in space technology.
Even outsiders have been grateful. David Choe, a graffiti artist who took shares rather than be paid for painting the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto in 2005 and is now worth NZ$600M, said he had finally been able to convince friends that art was worthwhile.