Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is now $165 billion after Meta reported a strong quarter with a beat on the top and bottom lines.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and co-founder of Meta, has 28 billion reasons to be happy about the company’s record-breaking quarter.

Zuckerberg is the wealthiest man alive at of Friday’s closing, with a $28 billion paper bonanza courtesy of a 22% increase in Meta stock. With a current net worth of $165 billion, the CEO is more wealthy than Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft.

In addition, he will get around $174 million in money when the business distributes its inaugural dividend in March. Approximately 350 million Class A and B shares, which are both entitled to dividends, are owned by Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg stands to gain about $690 million annually if Meta continues to pay out a 50-cent quarterly dividend.

For a man whose financial worth is heavily dependent on the success of Meta stock, this is a stunning turn of events. Based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Ranking, Zuckerberg’s net worth peaked in 2021 at around $142 billion, coinciding with the Nasdaq hitting a record high.

However, Meta was impacted harder than most by a market-wide downturn. The corporation received strong criticism from analysts and investors for investing billions of dollars in its virtual reality branch, Reality Labs. In response, Zuckerberg made significant changes to everything, dubbed Meta’s “year of efficiency.”

Immensely more IT CEOs did the same in 2022, 2023, and even 2024. Even yet, Meta shares were only worth around $90 apiece in October and November 2022, when the company was at its lowest point, and Zuckerberg’s net worth was only $36 billion, or 25% of his peak.

Meta released fourth-quarter profits that exceeded both profitability and sales targets. It increased all of the major metrics that the street monitored and in comparison to the same quarter last year, its net income more than quadrupled. It is currently valued at $1.2 trillion.