Financial
Snowflake IPO creates flood of wealth for Silicon Valley royalty, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey – Financial Post
Multifamily office Iconiq Capital’s stake worth a staggering US$8.3 billion by Wednesday afternoonAuthor of the article:Bloomberg NewsTom MaloneyPublishing date:Sep 16, 2020 • • 2 minute readFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty ImagesArticle contentSnowflake Inc.’s initial public offering isn’t just creating new fortunes, it’s adding to the wallets of some of Silicon…
Multifamily office Iconiq Capital’s stake worth a staggering US$8.3 billion by Wednesday afternoon
Author of the article:
Bloomberg News
Tom Maloney
Publishing date:
Sep 16, 2020 • • 2 minute read
Article content
Snowflake Inc.’s initial public offering isn’t just creating new fortunes, it’s adding to the wallets of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Iconiq Capital, a multifamily office whose clients include Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn Corp.’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter Inc.’s Jack Dorsey, took part in multiple Snowflake funding rounds beginning in 2017. Its 12 per cent stake in the company, purchased for US$245 million, was worth more than US$4 billion at the initial offering price of US$120. By early afternoon Wednesday, the same stake was worth a staggering US$8.3 billion.
Shares of the cloud-computing company stock surged as high as US$319 in New York trading before dropping back to US$247 at 1:06 p.m. Even at the initial offering price, Snowflake was worth US$33.3 billion, more than Twitter and almost triple the US$12.4 billion it was valued at in a February fundraising round.
The San Mateo, California-based firm’s top executives are also poised to see their wealth surge. Four of them — Frank Slootman, Bob Muglia, Michael Scarpelli and Benoit Dageville — together own stakes worth $3.7 billion at the offering price.
Only one of them, Dageville, was a founder. His stake is smaller than Slootman’s, who joined as chief executive officer from ServiceNow Inc. last year.
Concurrent with the IPO, former CEO Muglia is selling half of his 8.1 million Snowflake shares to Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which is also investing an additional US$250 million at the IPO price. Such deals aren’t typically part of Warren Buffett’s play book, although in 2018 Berkshire invested in the initial offering of Brazilian fintech StoneCo Ltd.
Buffett’s move has boosted the already sky-high institutional interest in the cloud-computing firm, Singh said. It “definitely validates the attractiveness of Snowflake’s IPO,” he said.
It’s so far been a winning bet for Buffett, with the value of Berkshire’s investment more than doubling by lunchtime.
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