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Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#71

Post by nknight »

ibejoeb wrote: post #55
_wp3r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty common when someone has a lot of cash that is liable to capitol gains. If you sell the assets to the pat you can pay the taxes over time on the money that is distributed instead of paying the capitol gains all at once and loosing that earning power. You do loose the money in that it you cant use it but you make more money in the long run because you spread the taxes out and make money on the potential…

Careful. Taxes in the US are pay-as-you-go. You can't just "pay the tax man in April." Well, you can, but you also have to pay him the penalty for failing to pay throughout the year. See http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc306.html .

There is an exception as mentioned there. If you pay an amount equal to 100% of the previous year's liability (110% if your AGI is over $150k), it doesn't matter how much more you owe in April.

(I personally ended up with a 2011 tax liability that was something like 160% of my 2010 liability, but I'd paid estimated taxes equal to my 2010 liabilities. So I had to cut the IRS a pretty big check in April, but had no penalties.)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#72

Post by cavilling_elite »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #9
jsavimbi wrote: post #2

He needs walking around money. So what?

Well, a billion is a lot of walking around money. If he just cashed out for no particular reason, it would point to a lack of faith in the growth prospects for Facebook. After all if you owned a billion dollars of a stock that you thought was a rocketship, wouldn't you leave it in and turn it into five or ten billion? Of could it could be he wanted to spread his risk around, or pay his taxes.

Not if you don't care anything about the stock price or money. He just made 1.13 bln dollars for his company. If he invests it directly in fb related growth he no longer has to worry about what NASDAQ does. He's making fb independent of the media fluctuation or the fact that he has shareholders for all. The question becomes, what would you do if you you had a successful company and you were just given 1.13 bln dollars without any strings?

This is just a thought experiment, but I think fb brilliantly played wall-street and now has enough money to build an infrastructure. Internet advertising isn't creative, so what will the "next gen fb" look like? And is it worth investing in, speculating that it means nothing to them.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#73

Post by ibejoeb »

techiferous wrote: post #60
ibejoeb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. Taxes in the US are pay-as-you-go. You can't just "pay the tax man in April." Well, you can, but you also have to pay him the penalty for failing to pay throughout the year. See http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc306.html .

The "penalty", as I understand it, is neither a fine nor a record of wrongdoing, as paying at the end of the year is not illegal. The penalty is the IRS saying that it would like to have the interest back that it otherwise would have earned if you had paid earlier. As far as I understand, it's perfectly kosher to wait until the end of the year to make payments; you just have to make sure you have the money to actuall…

It's a little more complicated than that, and it is a penalty. You may also owe interest, and they are two separate things (and interest is statutory, so you're really not negotiating there). There are multiple penalties for underpayment and nonpayment of federal taxes. If you're an employee and not withholding enough (because you have other income or AMT for example), you should be making estimated payments to cover the difference. Your employer is also subject to penalties if it fails to withhold and pay the gov't employment taxes (social security and medicare), and it's usually 100%. If you are self-employed, you need to make estimated payments.

tl;dr: the gov't has cashflow problems, too, and doesn't like to issue t-bonds to finance its receivables.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#74

Post by its_so_on »

tosseraccount wrote: post #36
albertsun wrote: post #5

Probably to pay his tax bill, right?

No. His stock was near zero when he acquired (created) them. He'll pay full cap gain rates when he realizes them (which is 15% cap gains rate which is not too bad for him; I pay a lot more on my labor gains). He owes no tax until then. If you received stock worth , say, one million , you might want to sell 1/3 to pay the tax. Otherwise if stock price goes to zero you've got a million in losses to write off which is h…

(EDIT: I don't know anything about this subject, the below is only a naive question. See response.)

are you sure about this. to me it's pretty obvious that if you receive a million dollars in stocks and, say, 48 hours later it goes to 0, then insofar as you owed taxes on the million due immediately, you have also just lost a million in taxable income; so you write the million loss off of the million in gains for net 0 increase or decrease in your taxable amount due to this gain-and-loss.

I know the IRS can be daft, but surely if you lose the exact amount you just got, then you've just netted nothing, taxable at your marginal tax rate on that gain for that type of gain, times nothing = nothing.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#75

Post by ibejoeb »

nknight wrote: post #71
ibejoeb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. Taxes in the US are pay-as-you-go. You can't just "pay the tax man in April." Well, you can, but you also have to pay him the penalty for failing to pay throughout the year. See http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc306.html .

There is an exception as mentioned there. If you pay an amount equal to 100% of the previous year's liability (110% if your AGI is over $150k), it doesn't matter how much more you owe in April. (I personally ended up with a 2011 tax liability that was something like 160% of my 2010 liability, but I'd paid estimated taxes equal to my 2010 liabilities. So I had to cut the IRS a pretty big check in April, but had no pen…

Right, you made estimated payments, and it was exactly the right way. You paid based on a reasonable estimation.

The point is it's pretty hard to just avoid paying taxes all year (either by plain not paying your self-employment taxes or misrepresenting your situation on a W-4), bank it, and come out clean.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#76

Post by Retric »

RandallBrown wrote: post #61
dageshi wrote: post #44

Ummm does anyone else think that maybe Mark Zuckerberg is now going to be filling the Steve Jobs shaped hole in the worlds tech publications?

Yes and no. I think he is a visionary CEO that knows how to get things done, but he's an engineer, while jobs was not. I think that Jeff Bezos is more Jobs than Zuckerberg is, but who knows.

Jobs did work for Atari, and they trusted him enough to do design circuit boards so IMO he was probably a competent electrical engineer. However, he did use Wozniak who was ridiculously good at circuit design so he could focus on other things. Still IMO, that's like having Einstein help with your math homework if it's an option you take it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#77

Post by flexterra »

RandallBrown wrote: post #61
dageshi wrote: post #44

Ummm does anyone else think that maybe Mark Zuckerberg is now going to be filling the Steve Jobs shaped hole in the worlds tech publications?

Yes and no. I think he is a visionary CEO that knows how to get things done, but he's an engineer, while jobs was not. I think that Jeff Bezos is more Jobs than Zuckerberg is, but who knows.

I think pretty soon the "Steve Jobs shaped hole" will be filled by Jack Dorsey

Re: Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

#80

Post by dsl »

foxhop wrote: post #79

30200000 * 37.58 = $1,134,916,000.00 Didn't Mark spend 1 Billion on the Instagram acquisition? Did he pay them off with equity? Why did he spend so much on instagram?

Mark Zuckerberg didn't buy Instagram. Facebook did. They are not the same.
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