Mark Zuckerberg had a happy Halloween this year, earning $1 billion on Thursday due to a surge in Facebook's fluctuating stock price.
A positive earnings report released Wednesday sent the stock up 10 percent on hump-day. However, reports that teens have not been logging into Facebook as much as they have in the past put a dark cloud over the news.
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Investors on Thursday apparently decided to put aside the bad news and reinvest in Facebook, sending the stock up four percent and making
Zuckerberg a billion dollars richer, ABC News reported. The stock closed Thursday afternoon at slightly more than $50 per share.
According to Forbes magazine, Zuckerberg's net worth was $19 billion as of September 2013. But a more recent estimate by research firm Equilar puts his net worth at closer to $30 billion.
The Facebook stock has long fluctuated.
When the company went public in May 2012, Facebook's stock debuted at $38 a share. In the next few months, the stocked tanked and was at $20 per share by mid-summer, ABC noted.
The $30 increase over the past year has been
largely attributed to the positive earnings report, with the Facebook stock increasing to nearly $52 per share shortly after the starting bell Friday morning.
With his $500,000 annual salary and 609,539,536 Facebook shares, it's no surprise that the 29-year-old tech entrepreneur from White Plains, N.Y.,
can afford to spend $30 million on four homes near his current Palo Alto, Calif., residence to prevent onlookers from getting too close to his home.
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Zuckerberg is among several tech executives who live in Palo Alto, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Google co-founder Larry Page.
After living in rented space for years, Zuckerberg reportedly paid $7 million in 2011 for the 5,000-square-foot home where he lives with his doctor wife, Priscilla Chan. He also owns another house in San Francisco.