The biggest news of the fortnight has been Facebook?s acquisition of WhatsApp. It?s dominated social media, what else, and market analysts have been going bananas trying to figure out whether the $19 billion price tag was way too excessive. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the purchase, saying it would pay back in time, but here?s the thing; what of the other founding members of Facebook? In fact, Zuckerberg is the only one of the original five founders who is in focus, what do the others have to say about what looks like a huge and risky investment? Do they have a say? Where are they now and what, er, is their Facebook status? Zuckerberg, we know, has a net worth of $30 billion, which is why he can afford to buy four houses near his Palo Alto residence for $30 million, purely based on rumours that a developer wanted to purchase one of them and market it to prospective buyers who could boast about being Zuckerman?s neighbour. What really has become of the others who all met at Harvard and started Facebook?
One co-founder was Dustin Moskovitz. He has turned to other ventures since Facebook. Thanks to Facebook?s rising stock price, the 29-year-old now has a net worth of $7.8 billion according to Wealth-X. Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008 to form a new venture called Asana, a productivity app but around 97% of his assets are still tied up in Facebook stock. Florida-born Moskovitz also has investments in start-ups including Path, FlipBoard, NationBuilder, Organizer, Venmo and Top Prospect, according to Wealth-X data.
The oldest co-founder was Eduardo Saverin, 31, who now lives in Singapore after renouncing his US citizenship in 2011. He has a net worth of around $2.5 billion according to Forbes, 82% of which is derived from his stake in Facebook. The Brazilian-born Saverin met Zuckerberg at Harvard. After a falling-out which was recreated in the movie, The Social Network, Saverin sued Facebook for an undisclosed amount. Eventually, the case was settled out of court and Saverin reportedly receiving a 5% stake in Facebook. He has since invested in excess of $5 million in several tech start-ups including Jumio and Qwiki, apart from property in Singapore where he has lived since 2009 and become notorious for his playboy lifestyle ?buying bottles of champagne at the most exclusive clubs in the company of the super-rich, society crowd and supermodels. He drives a Bentley and lives in a penthouse in one of the city?s wealthiest neighbourhoods. He also invested in Rachel K?a start-up cosmetics company run by Rachel Kum, a former Miss Universe.
Of the co-founders, the poorest, if that is the right description, is Chris Hughes, 30. He has a net worth of around $400 million as per estimates. He has less than the other founders because he exercised nearly all of his stock options. He quit Facebook in 2007 to become the coordinator of online marketing for US president Barack Obama?s 2008 presidential campaign. He then joined PR firm GMMB as an adviser and also spent a year traveling around the world. Apart from his remaining options in Facebook, he invested a large amount of his money in a majority stake in The New Republic, the magazine he bought in 2012 and where he is now publisher and editor-in-chief. His latest venture is a non-profit site called Jumo. Hughes is gay and married his long-term boyfriend Sean Eldridge in 2012 and they share a luxury New York apartment.
The fifth member of the founding team at Harvard is Andrew McCollum, 30. He left Facebook in 2006 to return to Harvard and complete his graduation in computer science. Since then, he has become an angel investor, having invested in a number of start ups, from Wirehog, a file sharing site, Babel Research (computational finance) and JobSpice, involved in online resume creation. He is also entrepreneur in residence at New Enterprise Associates and Flybridge Capital partners. His net worth is unknown.
