Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortunes have soared, thanks to investment fund GSV Capital’s recent stake purchase in the social networking site, which has put the Harvard dropout’s worth higher than that of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Earlier this week, GSV Capital Corp bought 225,000 shares in Facebook at an average price of $29.28 each. This values the site at $70 billion. Based on the new investment, Zuckerberg is worth approximately $18 billion, says a report in Time magazine.
“With the new valuation, Zuckerberg has one-upped Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whose fortunes are estimated to have dropped,” said the report.
This makes Zuckerberg the third-richest man in the technology sector in the world, behind Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. While Gates is estimated to be worth $56 billion, Ellison is the world’s fifth-richest billionaire at $39.5 billion.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg’s net worth stood at $13.5 billion. He shot past Apple’s Steve Jobs last year and has now passed Google’s Brin and Page, whose fortunes are estimated to have dropped from $19.8 billion to $17 billion in March.