When Dustin Moskovitz stepped away from Facebook Inc. four years after helping start the company, the 24-year-old owned a piece of the social-media giant that today would be worth about $18 billion.
Now he has another fortune to rival the first. Moskovitz has been vacuuming up shares of Asana Inc., the task-management company he left Facebook to create. Asana shares have skyrocketed more than 250% since mid-May, giving Moskovitz a stake valued at almost $8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Moskovitz’s second act is a demonstration of Facebook’s power to mint new fortunes. Another co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, used part of his winnings to create venture capital firm B Capital Group, which has reported about $1.8 billion in assets.
Moskowitz, who turned 37 in May, began buying additional Asana stock in June, and by the end of September his holding had increased by more than a third to 76.6 million shares. He’s now worth $26 billion, and is the fourth-richest person under 40 globally on Bloomberg’s index.
At the top of the list is Mark Zuckerberg, whose 15% ownership of Facebook makes him the world’s fourth-richest person with $126.5 billion.
A spokesperson for Asana declined to comment on Moskovitz’s behalf.
Harvard Roommates
Moskovitz co-created Facebook in 2004 from the Harvard University dorm room he shared with Zuckerberg. After the pair dropped out to move to Silicon Valley, Moskovitz became Facebook’s first chief technology officer and later vice president of engineering.
As the firm grew, Moskovitz and a colleague -- Justin Rosenstein, best known as the creator of the “Like” button -- started building task-management tools to help Facebook employees spend less time doing “work about work.” In 2008 they left to give the project their full attention.
Asana, which allows users to inspect other employees’ progress, leave comments or add new tasks, reached unicorn status in 2018 with a valuation above $1 billion. It went public in a direct listing in September 2020 with a market value of $5.5 billion and Moskovitz as its chief executive officer.
"The company produces software that enhances worker productivity, which has seen significant traction for enterprise customers in the work-from-anywhere era," said Amine Bensaid, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst.
When he left Facebook in 2008, Moskovitz parted on good terms, saying he would “forever bleed Facebook blue.”
That wasn’t the case for Saverin. He settled a legal dispute with Facebook in 2009 over the dilution of his stake in the company after the arrival of new investors. The settlement gave Saverin an undisclosed holding in the company and the right to be listed as a co-founder on Facebook’s website.