Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is expected to receive an annual dividend of $700m (£549m).
On Thursday, Meta Inc. said its revenue of $40 billion in the final quarter of last year exceeded Wall Street expectations and that it would pay investors its first quarterly dividend since Facebook went public on the stock market in 2012. .
Despite Meta cutting 22% of its workforce to bring its total headcount to about 19,000 and launching a $50 billion stock buyback, a rebound in advertising sales pushed the company’s quarterly profit down. reported that sales had tripled to $14 billion.
Mr. Zuckerberg also announced that the company, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, will pay 50 cents a share, its first dividend as a public company. Mehta said the $1.25 billion to investors will be the first of regular payments.
Zuckerberg owns approximately 350 million shares. That means if Meta pays roughly the same level of dividends every quarter, it would earn about $700 million in the first year of the policy.
The 39-year-old will earn a total of $27 million in compensation in 2022, the latest year for which full compensation figures are available.
Mehta came under fire Wednesday during a hearing by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened to question Zuckerberg and other tech executives over the platform’s impact on young users. The CEO expressed his condolences to parents who have lost children to online exploitation.
Throughout the hearing, members of Congress touted a bill that could strip Meta and other platforms of legal immunity for content posted on them. This comes months after meth was hit with a major lawsuit by attorneys general in 41 states over its effects on young users.
New Mexico’s attorney general also sued the company for failing to prevent child sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
We have reached out to Meta for comment.
