Mark Pincus’ move in April to sidestep lock-up provisions
and dump $190 million of stock in Zynga in an unorthodox stock offering keeps
looking worse. The CEO and co-founder of Zynga sold 16.5 million shares for
$11.64 each four months after Zynga’s initial public offering priced for $10, Forbes reports.
On Friday morning, Zynga’s stock plummeted by 18% to $2.31
after the social gaming company reduced its financial guidance for 2012. Those
shares Pincus sold earlier in the year are worth $38 million today. His entire
remaining stake in Zynga is worth about what he sold those shares for in April.
“Let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture,” Pincus wrote on his CEO blog
Thursday after the markets closed. “The world is playing games, and is
increasingly choosing social games.”
The big picture for Pincus is that he has pocketed a lot of
cash this year selling shares in two companies that are joined at the hip and
have been disasters for stock investors. An early investor in Facebook, Pincus
sold slightly more than 1 million Facebook shares in the Facebook IPO for the
post-fee sum of $38 million. With Facebook down nearly another 3% on the bad
Zynga news, those shares would be worth about $22 million today if Pincus had
kept them. Pincus owned about 4.3 million more Facebook shares after the
IPO—who knows if he dumped those after the lock-up expirations went away. He no
longer has to file Securities & Exchange Commission filings related to his
Facebook stock.
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