Mark Zuckerberg delighted Meta shareholders and Wall Street this week with news of the social media giant’s first-ever dividend. The IRS may also be happy, now that it’s staring at millions in taxes on the Meta stock dividends bound for Zuckerberg’s portfolio. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+20.32%,
is poised to make $700 million in dividends yearly. He owns nearly 350 million shares, according to FactSet, and the company will start paying a quarterly dividend of 50 cents a share.
That would yield nearly $167 million in federal taxes yearly, after a qualified-dividend tax of 20% and another 3.8% tax on the investment returns of rich households, two accounting experts said. California income taxes of 13.3% on the dividends could cost Zuckerberg another $93.1 million, said Andrew Belnap, an accounting professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. All in, that’s a combined $259.7 million in federal and state taxes annually on the Meta dividends, Belnap estimated. For context, U.S. taxpayers reported over $285 billion in qualified-dividend income to the IRS though mid-November 2023, according to agency statistics. Nearly 30 million tax returns reported qualified dividends through that time. Meta said it plans a quarterly cash dividend going forward, with the first such payment in March. Meta shares soared 20.5% on Friday, ending with a record-high close of $474.99. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
S&P 500
SPX
and Nasdaq Composite
COMP
all closed higher Friday.‘Zuck is getting a major break’ Meta announced the dividend payment in its earnings results Thursday, on the same week that Americans began filing their income taxes. A look at Zuckerberg’s dividends and their tax implications offer a peek at the debate about the varying ways wages and wealth are taxed. “Zuck is getting a major break,” said Andrew Schmidt, an accounting professor at No …
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META,
+20.32%,
is poised to make $700 million in dividends yearly. He owns nearly 350 million shares, according to FactSet, and the company will start paying a quarterly dividend of 50 cents a share.
That would yield nearly $167 million in federal taxes yearly, after a qualified-dividend tax of 20% and another 3.8% tax on the investment returns of rich households, two accounting experts said. California income taxes of 13.3% on the dividends could cost Zuckerberg another $93.1 million, said Andrew Belnap, an accounting professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. All in, that’s a combined $259.7 million in federal and state taxes annually on the Meta dividends, Belnap estimated. For context, U.S. taxpayers reported over $285 billion in qualified-dividend income to the IRS though mid-November 2023, according to agency statistics. Nearly 30 million tax returns reported qualified dividends through that time. Meta said it plans a quarterly cash dividend going forward, with the first such payment in March. Meta shares soared 20.5% on Friday, ending with a record-high close of $474.99. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
S&P 500
SPX
and Nasdaq Composite
COMP
all closed higher Friday.‘Zuck is getting a major break’ Meta announced the dividend payment in its earnings results Thursday, on the same week that Americans began filing their income taxes. A look at Zuckerberg’s dividends and their tax implications offer a peek at the debate about the varying ways wages and wealth are taxed. “Zuck is getting a major break,” said Andrew Schmidt, an accounting professor at No …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]