14 DAY TRIAL // Jan Koum, WhatsApp's CEO, isn't wasting any time in making money off the Facebook stock he received when he sold his company. In the past year, Koum sold shares worth more than $5 billion.
If you thought that Zuckerberg sold a lot of his shares in the past year, earning him more than $1.3 billion to invest in other projects, like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, then Koum's efforts to fill up his bank accounts will blow your mind.
Back in 2014, Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for a whopping $19 billion, which turned in quite a bit more due to the appreciation of the Facebook stock by the time the deal was closed. During the past year, Koum sold or gifted almost 43 million shares of Facebook stock, a SEC filing shows.
Based on Facebook's stock value on the dates of the sale, the shares would be worth more than $5 billion. Although rules indicate the shares can be sold or gifted, apparently he sold most of them. The filing shows he made more than 120 separate sale transactions beginning April 1, 2016, in which he sold more than 30 million shares for about $3.7 billion.
Another 12.6 million shares were given as a gift, but there is no mention in the SEC filing as to where they went.
Sold more than half his stock
It is not uncommon for high execs to sell their stock, especially since the company commonly awards them with shares and options, which usually represents most of an executive's compensation.
Koum, much like Zuckerberg, has a right to do what he pleases with his shares, within reason, since selling the stock without a proper plan could shake the company's price at the stock exchange.
On the other hand, it is rather uncommon to sell or gift as many shares as Koum did. He unloaded more than half of his Facebook holdings in the past year alone, going from owning 2.6% of Facebook's Class A common stock to just 1.2% this year.