Logo
BusinessBusiness

Facebook’s eye-popping $5 billion FTC fine may have set a record, but it’s a drop in the bucket for owner Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, who has a net worth of $79.8 billion according to Bloomberg, could pay the fine out-of-pocket and still remain comfortably placed as the fifth-richest man in the world.

The next in line, Zara founder Amancio Ortega, has $66.6 billion.

Of course, Zuckerberg wasn’t ordered to fork over any dough to settle claims his company violated its user privacy rules. Instead, the fine will be paid by shareholders, who were so unfazed by the FTC’s record-smashing fine that they boosted the stock up 1.1 percent in regular trading.

That 1 percent uptick, which sent the stock to $204.66 a share, added roughly $6.6 billion to the company’s $584.2 billion market cap — $1.6 billion more than the cost of the fine.

After markets closed, Wall Street cheered again when Facebook reported second quarter earnings of $2.6 billion on revenue of $16.9 billion — a jump of 28 percent from this time last year. It recorded a $2 billion quarterly charge tied to the FTC’s fine, but investors still sent the stock soaring more than 3 percent in late trading.

Comments
anonymous profile image
Powered by RoundtableBuilt on infrastructure designed for real-time media. Learn more at RTB.io.© Roundtable 2026. By using this site you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy