A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.

IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.

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dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???

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ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out.

There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.

Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.

	▲	ScoobleDoodle 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't seem to be mostly just fluff to me. MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019. In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money. Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount. In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.

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thomastjeffery 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.

I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.

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financetechbro 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Zuck can just take out loans against his equity. He doesn’t need to sell any of it to benefit from Metas “worth”

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litoE 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.

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naniwaduni 2 hours ago | parent [-]

People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.

Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.

Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.

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_DeadFred_ an hour ago | parent [-]

I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.

	▲	naniwaduni 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid. Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
	▲	grebc an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wouldn’t exactly call it a loophole as such. And you can’t just Willy Nilly tax loan values. Any asset a bank is willing to take is collateral has the same issue, it’s just very pronounced in this instance. If you take your idea at face value, anyone who borrows against their property to renovate/upgrade would be up for tax.