Will Millionaire Lady Gaga Pay More Taxes than Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg?
February 8, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Thanks to her skills on stage and attention-grabbing personality and ensembles, Lady Gaga’s lavishly loaded. But despite the fantastic account balances the Lady may be viewing during her ATM visits, the fact is that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rapidly expanding billionaire fortune easily dwarfs the money piles of the “Born This Way” singer. So why is it, then, that if Gaga’s earnings have remained relatively steady, she may end up paying more to the taxman in 2012 than Zuckerberg?
David S. Miller, a celebrated tax lawyer from New York, sorts out some of the issues behind this bizarre state of affairs. In a recently published opinion piece written for the New York Times, Miller even muses about what he calls the “Zuckerberg tax.” He espouses the later as a much better alternative to the “Buffet rule” that’s sort of making the rounds in Washington. Both proposed taxes aim to make the tax burden more equitably distributed among Americans of all income levels. Miller’s imagined Zuckerberg tax would make unsold stock susceptible to income taxation.
In the coming years, Zuckerberg will have plenty of unsold Facebook shares on which he will pay no taxes, but next year at least, he’s expected to make history after paying a tax bill exceeding $2 billion on account of stock maneuverings that he’s expected to make in an effort to secure more control over the company he’s built.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/the-zuckerberg-tax.html
The Fortune and Power of Mark Zuckerberg
February 3, 2012 by admin · Comments Off
Among the deluge of Facebook articles currently in circulation, two are particularly interesting for their distinct focus on the man behind it all: twenty-seven-year-old Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, of White Plains, New York (at this stage, his saga certainly deserves some historicizing). The first, written by Somini Sengupta, appears in the New York Times; the second in the Los Angeles Times, and is written by perennial tech-beat savant Nathaniel Olivarez-Giles.
Sengupta highlights the degree of control that Zuckerberg has managed to retain at this significant stage of maturation for Facebook; as the company heads into its colossal IPO, Le Zuck holds approximately 60 percent of his company’s shares as well as three out of five board chairs — that means he has an almost unprecedented amount of control over a company of such proportions. Sengupta also discusses the important role former-Facebook president Sean Parker had in advising and guiding Zuckerberg to such levels of company power.
Olivarez-Giles shares that starting January 1, 2013, the person behind “frictionless sharing” will be paid only $1 dollar per year for his work as company CEO. Zuckerberg’s salary for 2012 is expected to be $600,000, but it’s unlikely he’ll be missing the six-figure salary since his personal fortune is about to rocket into the eleven-figure range, and the new token salary is a tradition among ultra-rich leaders — the late Steve Jobs from Apple, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and even Google CEO Larry Page have all received that loneliest of numbers as their base annual salary.
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Facebook’s IPO Not Until Late 2012?
September 16, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
This week the Financial Times reported that Facebook’s will not have its initial public offering until late 2012. The FT cited sources close to the company in the report for the scoop, but all that was obtained from Larry Yu, Facebook’s spokesperson, was: “As is our typical practice, we just don’t get into speculation about an IPO.”
Although there are apparently some 200 companies sitting on their IPO start time because of the uncertain market, it seems that what’s prompting the delay is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to keep his team “focus[ed] on developing products” instead of on “collecting an IPO payout.”
Financial watchers expect there to be a “frenzy” like the one last seen when Google went public in 2004.The private markets are currently giving Facebook a valuation that hovers at $80 billion and investors are ready to buy Facebook shares, clearly. Even without any help from the public markets, Facebook was able to come up with $1 billion.
This January Facebook’s number of shareholders went beyond 500, which is a threshold set by the Securities and Exchange Commission: once that number is passed, companies must open up financial results within a short, specified timeframe. Previous calculations had set Facebook’s IPO date for April 2012. Seems investors will have to wait a bit longer.
Read More:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/2b842146-dec3-11e0-a228-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1XybpqE00
Facebook CEO Asks FB Aspirants Out on a Nature Walk
July 8, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Lately, very similar tales have been springing up. Would-be Facebook aspirants have begun — anonymously, because of non-disclosure agreement niceties — to divulge the courting rituals of Facebook’s top brass for the recruitment of new talent. It all begins with an unexpected, but enormously welcomed, of course, email from the top man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, inviting the recipient out on a stroll through a stretch of Palo Alto’s woods.
Those who take him up on the nature outing are then led all the way to a special high point overlooking the Silicon Valley. It’s here that, to go by the account of one of these prospects, Zuckerberg “point[s] out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies.” He then directs the invitee’s gaze toward the Facebook structure and declares that his company will “eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if [the invitee] joined the company, [he/she] could be a part of it all.”
It sounds like an awesome way to be interviewed. Still, among those lucky enough to have the experience, there were reports of instances of “almost choking” on morning coffee at first blush of the surprise invitation and of general feelings of it all being “pretty disorienting.”
It seems some still prefer the old standard of sending out super-polished applications, going through multiple interview sessions, and waiting to hear back on whether they did, or did not, just land their dream job.
Read More:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/A-Walk-in-the-Woods-with-Mark-nytimes-1344654779.html?x=0
Mark Zuckerberg Is Target of Facebook Profile Hack
January 27, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The Facebook profile of company founder Mark Zuckerberg was hacked on Tuesday, as unauthorized posts were made from his account. It’s another embarrassing privacy breach for the social networking site, and one that hits close to home. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy saw his Facebook profile be hacked as well.
The tech news site TechCrunch first reported the hack, which involved an “odd and seemingly drunken” post on Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile:
“Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011”
The slash tag refers to Facebook’s Hacker Cup competition. According to Sophos, the hack might have been password-related. As the blog points out, many celebrities have their social networking handled by a team of assistants instead of making posts themselves. This leaves them open to having their password leak outside of their team.
Read More:
www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376676,00.asp
nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/01/26/facebooks-zuckerberg-in-fan-page-hack
