This Is What Mark Zuckerberg's Portfolio Looks Like (FB, MSFT)

Have you ever wondered where the richest people in the world place their investments? Mark Zuckerberg, according to Forbes List of The World’s Billionaires, was the sixth-richest person in the world as of March 2016 with a net worth of $50 billion. The founder and majority voting share owner of Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) is also one of the youngest entrepreneurs with such massive wealth on the world’s wealthiest list. Learning what these indelible figures have in their portfolios can offer insight into which up-and-coming technologies are being invested in by the powerful and elite.

Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan made headline news and philanthropic history in 2015 when they pledged to give away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes. At current values, that equals $49.5 billion. However, unlike Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), this money is funneled into a limited liability corporation controlled by Zuckerberg and Chan. This essentially means the new LLC becomes, in time, one of the wealthiest investors. Zuckerberg stated in the historic pledge that only $1 billion a year over the next few years would be pulled out of Facebook, with the amount growing at some point in the future. The purpose of the LLC focuses on “advancing human potential and promoting equality” through philanthropic investments and by backing political causes. Some lucky companies could see large influxes of capital once this starts happening.

Zuckerberg, in his own investment portfolio since 2013, has invested in Panorama Education, Vicarious, AltSchool, MasteryConnect and Asana for a total of $211 million. Panorama’s $4 million seed investment by Zuckerberg supported bringing big data analytics to school boards throughout the United States. An amount of $52 million in two separate investments into Vicarious supports artificial intelligence’s attempts to understand the world as humans do, through a visual perception system for computers.

Early in 2015, Zuckerberg was the largest investor, with $100 million, in AltSchool, a network of schools with an interdisciplinary team offering experimental learning. Following on the education theme, MasteryConnect received a $5 million investment for its learning solutions for educators around the world. Lastly, Zuckerberg’s entrepreneurial investment spirit invested $50 million into Asana, a project and task management cloud platform for teams.

One investment objective is clear: Zuckerberg personally invests in private ventures in technology and education sectors.

Part of a person’s net worth, when you are as rich as Zuckerberg, usually contains real estate, and he is no different. Zuckerberg purchased his first home in Palo Alto, California, in 2011 for $7 million. As the super-rich do not usually buy real estate in their own names, speculation surrounds every neighboring home being purchased by 2013 for a total of $30 million. Zuckerberg’s first home was bought through a third-party LLC, and the adjoining homes were purchased through Iconiq Capital, a known money manager for the wealthy. These homes are then back-leased to their previous owners. Local brokers are confident that Zuckerberg was the purchaser and wanted to protect his privacy from a private developer that was looking to buy up the properties.

Zuckerberg is also confirmed as buying a San Francisco Pied-a-terre near Delores Park for $9.9 million, and is rumored to be the purchaser of the penthouse of One57 in Manhattan, New York, for a city record-breaking $90 million. This would put his real estate holdings at over $137 million.

The new charitable LLC that controls the bulk of Zuckerberg’s wealth from 2016 going forward will be in the top five largest philanthropic organizations in the United States. However, even with this amount of wealth being siphoned out of his personal net worth, the remaining 1% still represents $500 million in personal wealth.