Just 5 years after founding Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than Apple’s iconic chief Steve Jobs.
This year, Zuckerberg, 26, added $4.9 billion to his fortune–vaulting to #35 on the Forbes 400 with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion. Why the jump? Recent private equity investments in Facebook valued the firm at around $23 billion–more than triple its 2009 value of $7 billion. Illiquid private shares in secondary markets point to an even richer valuation.
Jobs has a net worth of $6.1 billion–$1 billion higher than 2009–placing him at # 42 in the list of America’s richest. Still, he couldn’t keep up with Tech’s new whiz kid.
Jobs may be the face of Apple (a company he founded in 1976–8 years before Zuckerberg was born), but the majority of his money comes from his stake in Disney. He acquired 138 million shares of Disney after he sold his animation studio, Pixar, to the company in 2006. Those shares were valued at $4.4 billion when we locked in the numbers for the 400. His 5.5 million shares of Apple were worth about $1.3 billion.
While the new wealth rankings mean little more than Silicon Valley bragging rights, the two tycoons might soon be trespassing on each other’s business turf. On September 1st, Apple entered the social network fray with its new music app, Ping. Facebook is rumored to be developing its own phone to go up against Apple’s uber-popular iPhone. It’s speculated that the Facebook phone will run on Google’s Android operating system.
Source forbes.com