Seed Capital
The riches Saverin earned from Facebook -- his stake today is worth about $18 billion, according to the wealth index -- enabled him to provide some of the seed capital for the investment firm that he co-founded in 2015. B Capital Group focuses on tech companies that have the potential to digitize big industries. Unlike Asana, however, it remains closely held and comprises only a fraction of its founder’s net worth.
Saverin, 39, who has lived in Singapore since 2009, renounced his U.S. citizenship a decade ago, just before Facebook’s initial public offering. The decision may have exempted him from tens of millions of dollars in tax liability.
A spokesperson for Saverin had no immediate comment.
A fourth Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, 37, who roomed with Moskovitz and Zuckerberg at Harvard, took another tack when he left the firm. He used his Facebook fortune to try to turn around the New Republic magazine -- a venture that ended disastrously -- and co-founded the non-profit Economic Security Project, which supports stronger anti-monopoly regulations and a guaranteed income for all Americans. He advocated breaking up Facebook in a 2019 New York Times op-ed.
Promissory Notes
In the months before its September 2020 direct listing, Moskovitz loaned Asana $450 million. In exchange for the cash, the San Francisco-based company gave him convertible promissory notes. It could repay Moskovitz by converting the notes into Asana stock at a predetermined rate.
The company chose to convert them on July 1, according to regulatory filings. That effectively handed Moskovitz more than 17 million shares of Asana’s class B stock at a price just above $31 at a time when they were trading at $63. The shares were down 2.9% to $100.83 at 11:13 a.m. in New York.
In 2010, Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, became the youngest couple ever to sign the Giving Pledge, which commits them to donate most of their wealth to charity.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.