A combined 70 million Class A stock shares of Facebook are on sale by CEO Mark Zuckerburg and chairman of Facebook as the company is joining the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
About 41 million shares are available from Zuckerberg, who will also buy Class B shares which have more voting weight.
Class B share gives the shareholder 10 votes, while the Class A share gives one vote. Zuckerberg will now get a control of over nearly 63 percent of the voting power of Facebook.
The S&P 500 index contains a list of companies with market capitalization of over $4 billion and Facebook will be added on Friday after markets close.
The stock of Facebook saw a dip of more than 4 percent immediately after the news and later recovered but was still down less than 1 percent on Thursday afternoon.
The Class A shares are being offered to index funds with portfolios based on stocks included in the index. At Wednesday’s stock price of $55.57 per share, the total value of the offering, at about $3.89 billion not counting expenses.
Proceeds from sale of Class A shares will be used by Zuckerberg to pay taxes incurred for buying 60 million shares of Class B stock and for charitable contributions.
Equity analyst of Standard & Poor’s, Scott Kessler gave a “Buy” rating on Facebook’s stock and noted that since Facebook’s May 2012 initial public offering, Zuckerberg’s ownership has declined “only slightly” and that the new sale will reduce his stake and voting power only minimally.
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